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HEART OF MAN 

AND OTHER PAPERS 



BY 



GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 



"Deep in the general heart of men" 

— Wordsworth 



■ 



NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 

1920 



9j3 



*A 






COPYRIGHT, 1899, 191 2, I9I4, BY 
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 



MOV 12 1820 



©CU604069 



CONTENTS 

HEART OF MAN 

Taormina, 5 

A New Defence of Poetry, 51 

Democracy, 141 

The Ride, 173 

THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS, 219 

TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

Historical Criticism, 253 
Esthetic Criticism, 275 

WENDELL PHILLIPS: The Faith of an American, 299 



HEART OF MAN 



(Eo t&e ^Hemarp of 
EUGENE MONTGOMERY 

MY FRIEND 

DEAR WAS HIS PRAISE, — 'AND PLEASANT 'T WERE TO ME,— 
ON WHOSE FAR GRAVE TO-NIGHT THE DEEP SNOWS DRIFT. 

IT NEEDS NOT NOW; TOGETHER WE SHALL SEE 

HOW HIGH CHRIST'S LILIES O'ER MAN'S LAURELS LIFT. 

February 13, 1899. 



The intention of the author was to illustrate how 
poetry, politics, and religion are the flowering of the 
same human spirit, and have their feeding roots in a 
common soil, u deep in the general heart of men." 



TAORMINA 



What should there be in the glimmering lights of a 
poor fishing- village to fascinate me? Far below, a mile 
perhaps, I behold them in the darkness and the storm 
like some phosphorescence of the beach; I see the pale 
tossing of the surf beside them; I hear the continuous roar 
borne up and softened about these heights; and this is 
night at Taormina. There is a weirdness in the scene — 
the feeling without the reality of mystery; and at even- 
ing, I know not why, I cannot sleep without stepping 
upon the terrace or peering through the panes to see 
those lights. At morning the charm has flown from the 
shore to the further heights above me. I glance at the 
vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop Etna, 
like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my 
eyes seek the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, 
rising nigh at hand a thousand feet, almost sheer, less 
than half a mile westward. The nearer height, precipice- 
faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined cita- 
del, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock 
toward its right, a hermitage church among the heavily 
hanging mists. The other horn of the massive hill, some- 
what more remote, behind and to the old castle's left, ex- 
poses on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a hamlet. 
It, too, is cloud-wreathed — the lonely crag of Mola. Over 

s 



6 HEART OF MAN 

these hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; 
and often they darken threateningly, and creep softly 
down the slopes, and fill the next-lying valley, and roll, 
and lift again, and reveal the flank of Monte d'Oro 
northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking 
the other day, with one of these floating showers gently 
blowing in my face down this defile, I noticed, where the 
mists hung in fragments from the cloud out over the 
gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the pro- 
found ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic 
charm which delights lovers of the mountains and the 
sea springs from such Gothic moods of nature, I felt for 
a moment something of the pleasure of recognition in 
meeting with this northern and familiar element in the 
Sicilian landscape. 

One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot 
be quite a stranger anywhere on earth. In new lands I 
find the poet's old domain. It is not only from the land- 
side that these intimations of old acquaintance come. 
When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy 
mountain tops, and range home at last upon the sea, 
something familiar is there too, — that which I have 
always known, — but marvelously transformed and 
heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of 
sunshine in the offing through unseen rents of heaven, as 
brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have beheld a thousand times, 
but here they remind me rather of cloud-lights on far 
western plains; and where have I seen those still tracts 
of changeful color, iridescent under the silvery vapors 
of noon; or, when the weather freshens and darkens, 
those whirlpools of pure emerald bright in the gray ex- 
panse of storm? They seem like memories of what has 
been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fas- 



TAORMINA 7 

cination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple 
picture: only an arm of mist thrusting out from yonder 
lowland by the little cape, and making a near horizon, 
where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes 
of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insub- 
stantial mole. All day I gaze on these sights of beauty 
until it seems that nature herself has taken on nobler 
forms forever more. When the mountain storm beats the 
pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in 
the hour before dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; 
but the oblivion is conscious, and half a memory of child- 
hood nights: in an instant comes the recollection, "I am 
on the coasts, and these are the couriers, of Etna." 

The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure 
personality; it is the habitation of a new presence, a storm- 
genius that I have never known; it is born of Etna, whence 
all things here have being and draw nourishment. It is 
not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the valleys, 
the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean-plain; it 
is not a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the 
moist Hyades, or ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediter- 
ranean night; it does not pass like Atlantic tempests on 
great world-currents: it remains. Its home is upon Etna; 
thence it comes and thither it returns ; it gathers and dis- 
perses, lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and 
though it suffer the clear north wind, or the west, to divide 
its veils with heaven, again it draws the folds together 
about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends it forth; 
then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides 
its face: it is the Sicilian winter. 



HEART OF MAN 



II 



But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its 
children even in this season. On the third day, at 
farthest, I was told it would bring back the sun; and 
I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped in 
impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw 
open my casement and stepped out upon the terrace, 
I saw it, like my native winter, expanding its broad 
flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds 
spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, 
and of the snowfields whose long fair drifts shone far 
down the sides. Villages and groves were visible, cloth- 
ing all the lower zone, and between lay the plain. It 
seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away. 
From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope 
measures more than twenty miles, and as many more 
conduct the eye downward to the western fringe — a vast 
bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so 
large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than 
it does the distance of the stars. High up, forests peer 
through the ribbed snows, and extinct craters stud the 
frozen scene with round hollow mounds innumerable. A 
thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain. 
How natural it seems for it to be sublime! It is the 
peer of the sea and of the sky. All day it flashed and 
darkened under the rack, and I rejoiced in the sight, 
and knew why Pindar called it the pillar of heaven; and 
at night it hooded itself once more with the winter cloud. 

Ill 

Would you see this land as I see it? Come then, since 
Etna gives a fair, pure morning, up over the shelving bank 



TAORMINA 9 

to the great eastern spur of Taormina, where stood the 
hollow theater, now in ruins, and above it the small temple 
with which the Greeks surmounted the highest point. 
It is such a spot as they often chose for their temples; 
but none ever commanded a more noble prospect. The 
far-shining sea, four or five hundred feet below, washes 
the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each hand is 
disclosed the whole of that side of Sicily which faces the 
rising sun. To the left and northward are the level 
straits, with the Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly 
sown with light snow, as far as the Cape of Spartivento, 
distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in front expands 
the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented 
coast, bay and beach, point after point, to where, sixty 
miles distant, the great blue promontory of Syracuse 
makes far out. On the land-side Etna fills the south with 
its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languid 
cone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges 
nearer over the intervening plain to the well-wooded ridge 
of Castiglione, and, next, to the round solitary top of 
Monte Maestra, with its long shoreward descent, and 
comes to rest on the height of Taormina overhead, with 
its hermitage of Santa Maria della Rocca, its castle, and 
Mola. Yet farther off, at the head of the defile, looms 
the barren summit of Monte Venere, with Monte d'Oro 
and other hills in the foreground, and northward, peak 
after peak, travels the close Messina range. 

A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great 
masses majestically grouped, grand in contour! Yet to 
call it sublime does not render the impression it makes 
upon the soul. Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and dull 
were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit 
here; but constantly the scene is beautiful, and yields 



io HEART OF MAN 

that delight which dwells unwearied with the soul. One 
may be seldom touched to the exaltation which sublimity 
implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habit of 
one who lives as heaven made him; and what character- 
izes this landscape and sets it apart is the permanence 
of its beauty, its perpetual and perfect charm through 
every change of light and weather, and in every quarter 
of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether the eye 
sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the 
nearer features, for they, too, are wonderfully composed. 
This hill of my station falls down for half a mile with 
broken declivities, and then becomes the Cape of Taor- 
mina, and takes its steep plunge into the sea. Yonder 
picturesque peninsula to its left, diminished by distance 
and strongly relieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of 
Sant' Andrea, and beside it a cluster of small islands lies 
nearer inshore. On the other side, to the right of our 
own cape, shines our port, with Giardini, the village of 
my fishers' lights, the beach with its boats, and the white 
main road winding in the narrow level between the bluffs 
and the sands. The port is guarded on the south by the 
peninsula of Schiso, where ancient Naxos stood; and just 
beyond, the river Alcantara cuts the plain and flows to 
the sea. At the other extremity, northward of Sant' 
Andrea, is the cove of Letojanni, with its village, and 
then, perhaps eight miles away, the bold headland of 
Sant' Alessio closes the shore view with a mass of rock 
that in former times completely shut off the land approach 
hither, there being no passage over it, and none around 
it except by the strip of sand when the sea was quiet. 
All this ground, with its several villages, from Sant' 
Alessio to the Alcantara, and beyond into the plain, was 
anciently the territory of Taormina. 



TAORMINA ii 

The little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright 
shore and the gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace 
whose two horns jut out into the air like capes. The 
northern one of these is my station, the site of the old 
temple and the amphitheater; the southern one opposite 
shows the facade of the Dominican convent; and the 
town circles between, possibly a mile from spur to spur. 
Here and there long broken lines of the ancient wall, 
black with age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic 
tower, built as if for warfare; a square belfry, a ruined 
gateway, stand out among the humble roofs. Gardens 
of orange and lemon trees gleam like oblong parks, prin- 
cipally on the upper edge toward the great rock. If 
you will climb, as I have done, the craggy plateau close 
by, which overhangs the theater and obstructs the view 
of the extreme end of the town at this point, you will see 
from its level face, rough with the plants of the prickly- 
pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and the gate 
toward Messina. 

The face of the country is bare. Here beneath, where 
the main ravine of Taormina cuts into the earth between 
the two spurs of the city, are terraces of fruit trees and 
vegetables, and, wherever the naked rock permits, similar 
terraces are seen on the castle hill and every less steep 
slope, looking as if they would slide off. Almond and 
olive trees cling and climb all over the hillside, but 
their boughs do not clothe the country. It is gray to 
look at, because of the masses of natural rock every- 
where cropping out, and also from the substructure of 
the terraces, which, seen from below, present banks of 
the same gray stone. The only color is given by the 
fan-like plants of the prickly-pear, whose flat, thicks 
lipped, pear-shaped leaves, stuck with thorns, and often 



I2 HEART OF MAN 

extruding their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull 
green to the scene. This plant grows everywhere, like 
wild bush, to a man's height, covering the otherwise 
infertile soil, and the goats crop it. A closer view shows 
patches of wild candytuft and marigolds, like those at 
my feet, and humble purple and blue blossoms hang 
from crannies or run over the stony turf; but these are 
not strong enough to be felt in the prevalent tones. 
The blue of ocean, the white of Etna, the gray of 
Taormina — this is the scene. 

Three ways connect the town with the lower world. 
The modern carriage road runs from the Messina gate, 
and, quickly dropping behind the northern spur, winds 
in great serpentine loops between the Campo Santo below 
and old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, until 
it slowly opens on the southern outlook, and, after two 
miles of tortuous courses above the lovely coves, comes 
out on the main road along the coast. The second way 
starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward 
Etna, and goes down more precipitously along the outer 
flank of the southern spur, with Mola (here shifted to 
the other side of the castle hill) closing the deep ravine 
behind- and at last it empties into the torrent of Selma, 
in whose bed it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short 
way, leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet 
keeps to a ridge between the folds of the ravine which 
it discloses on each side, with here and there a contadino 
cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a sportsman wander- 
ing with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign 
of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across 
the distant sands by the sea. It debouches through great 
limestone quarries on the main road. There, seen from 
below, Taormina comes out — a cape, a town, and a hill. 



TAORMINA 13 

It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a 
wedge; one end of the broad face dips into the sea, the 
other, high on land, exposes swelling bluffs; its back 
bears the town, its point lifts the castle. 

This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs 
over it! How poor, how mean, how decayed the little 
town now looks amid all this silent beauty of enduring 
nature! It could not have been always so. This 
theater at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at 
each end by great piers of massive Roman masonry, 
and showing broken columns thick strewn in the midst 
of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendor and 
populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine 
columns in position in two groups; part are shattered 
half-way up, part are yet whole, and in the gap between 
the groups shines the lovely sea with the long southern 
coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame. 
Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladi- 
ators fought. The enclosure is large, much over a 
hundred yards in diameter. It held many thousands. 
Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the 
roadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the 
first square I entered those small Norman windows, with 
the lovely pillars and the round arch. On the ancient 
church I have observed the ornamentation and moldings 
of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over the 
fountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was 
originally a mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a 
bath there; in all quarters I come on some slight, poor 
relics of other ages; and always in the faces of the 
people, where every race seems to have set its seal, 
I see the ruins of time. These echoes are not all of 
far-off things. That lookout below was a station of 



14 HEART OF MAN 

English cannon, I am told; and the bluff over Giardini, 
beyond the torrent, takes its name from the French tents 
pitched there long ago. The old walls can be traced 
for five miles, but now the circuit is barely two. I won- 
der, as I go down to my room in the Casa Timeo, what 
was the past of this silent town, now so shrunken from 
its ancient limits; and who, I ask myself, was Timeo? 



IV 

I thought when I first saw the inaccessibility of this 
mountain-keep that I should have no walks except upon 
the carriage road ; but I find there are paths innumerable. 
Leap the low walls where I will, I come on unsuspected 
ways broad enough for man and beast. They run down 
the hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as 
they descend, like the branching streams of a waterfall. 
Some are rudely paved, and hemmed by low walls; 
others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth, 
often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in 
the most unexpected places, not without a suggestion 
of peril, to make eye and foot alert, and to infuse a 
certain wild pleasure into the exercise. The multiplicity 
of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, 
for here one charm of Italian landscape exists in perfec- 
tion. Every few moments the scene rearranges itself in 
new combinations, as on the Riviera or at Amain, and 
makes an endless succession of lovely pictures. The 
infinite variety of these views is not to be imagined unless 
it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought 
by mere change of position, there is also a constant trans- 
formation of tone and color from hour to hour, as the 



TAORMINA 15 

lights and shadows vary, and from day to day, with 
the unsettled weather. 

Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the 
sense of beauty which is the better part of my rambles? 
It is to say that here I went up and down on the open 
hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or kept the cliff- 
line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into 
the vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, 
and wound by the gushing streams through the orchards. 
In every excursion I make some discovery, and bring 
home some golden store for memory. Yesterday I found 
the olive slopes over Letojanni — beautiful old gnarled 
trees, such as I have never seen except where the nightin- 
gales sing by the eastern shore of Spezzia. I did not doubt 
when I was told that these orchards yield the sweetest 
oil in the world. It was the lemon harvest, and every- 
where were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like 
apples under the slender trees, with a gatherer here 
and there; for this is always a landscape of solitary 
figures. To-day I found the little beach of San Nicolo, 
not far from the same place. I kept inland, going down 
the hollow by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, 
gravelly stream in a dell that is like a nook in the Berk- 
shire hills, and then along the upland on the skirts of 
Monte d'Oro, till by a sharp turn seaward I came out 
through a marble quarry where men were working with 
what seemed slow implements on the gray or party- 
colored stone. I passed through the rather silent group, 
who stopped to look at me, and a short distance beyond 
I crossed the main road, and went down by a stream to 
the shore. I found it strewn with seaside rock, as a 
hundred other beaches are, but none with rocks like 
these. They were marble, red or green, or shot with 



1 6 HEART OF MAN 

variegated hues, with many a soft gray, mottled or wavy- 
lined; and the sea had polished them. Very lovely they 
were, and shone where the low wave gleamed over them. 
I had wondered at the profusion of marbles in the Italian 
churches, but I had not thought to find them wild on a 
lonely Sicilian beach. Once or twice already I had seen 
a block rosy in the torrent-beds, and it had seemed a 
rare sight; but here the whole shore was piled and inlaid 
with the beautiful stone. 

I have learned now that Taormina is famous for these 
marbles. Over thirty varieties were sent to the Vienna 
Exhibition, and they won the prize. I got this informa- 
tion from the keeper of the Communal Library, with 
whom I have made friends. He recalls to my memory 
the ship that Hieron of Syracuse gave to Ptolemy, won- 
derful for its size. It had twenty banks of rowers, three 
decks, and space to hold a library, a gymnasium, gardens 
with trees in them, stables, and baths, and towers for 
assault, and it was provided by Archimedes with many 
ingenious mechanical devices. The wood of sixty ordi- 
nary galleys was required for its construction. I de- 
scribe it because its architect, Filea, was a Taorminian 
by birth, and esteemed in his day second only to Archi- 
medes in his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths 
of this huge galley he used these beautiful Taorminian 
marbles. My friend the librarian told me also, with his 
Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the Eugenaean, 
which was praised by Pliny, and used at the sacred 
feasts of Rome; but now, he said sadly, the grape had 
lost its flavor. 

The sugar-cane, which flourished in later times, is 
also gone. But the mullet that is celebrated in Juvenal's 
verse, and the lampreys that once went to better Alexan- 



TAORMINA 17 

drian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the shrimps 
are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as 
long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. 
The most ancient memory here is of them, for this is 
the shore of Charybdis. It is stated in Sallust and 
other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the 
Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the 
whirlpool of the straits, after being carried beneath the 
sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach beneath 
the hill of Taormina. 

The rock and the sea were finally blended in one of 
my first discoveries in the land, and in consequence they 
have seemed, to my imagination, more closely united 
here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I had 
strolled down the main road, and was walking toward 
Letojanni. I came, after a little, to a great cliff that 
overhung the sea, with room for the road to pass be- 
neath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, 
a low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed 
not to come from the breaking waves, loud on the 
beach: it was a more solemn, a more piercing and con- 
tinuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grand 
music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the 
hollowed cliff, and reechoed with a mighty volume of 
sound from invisible sources. It seemed the voice of 
the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighborhood in 
that lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the 
sea-music, and had become resonant of itself with those 
living harmonies heard only in the Psalmist's song. It 
seemed a lyre for the centuries; and I thought over how 
many a conqueror, how many a race, that requiem had 
been lifted upon it as they passed to their death on 
this shore. I came back slowly in the twilight, and was 



18 HEART OF MAN 

roused from my reverie by the cold wind breathing on 
me as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen and 
frosted like the bright December breezes of my own land. 
It was the kiss of Etna on my cheek. 



V 

Will you hear the legend of Taormina? — for in these 
days I dare not call it history. Noble and romantic it 
is, and age-long. I had not hoped to recover it; but my 
friend the librarian has brought me books in which pa- 
triotic Taorminians have written the story celebrating 
their dear city. I was touched by the simplicity with 
which he informed me that the town authorities had been 
unwilling to waste on a passing stranger these little paper- 
bound memorials of their city. "But," he said, "I told 
them I had given you my word." So I possess these 
books with a pleasant association of Sicilian honor, and 
I have read them with real interest. As I turned the 
pages I was reminded once more how impossible it is to 
know the past. The past survives in human institu- 
tions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations 
of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. Custom 
and law are for an age; race after race is pushed to the 
sea, and dies; only epic saga and psalm have one date 
with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one 
silence at the last with them. Least of all does the 
past survive in the living memories of men. Here and 
there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert 
embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless 
air preserve on rock and column the lost speech of Nile; 
so the mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living 
fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that 



TAORMINA 19 

was. I have been a diligent reader of books in my time; 
and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a 
narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished 
by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of 
history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my 
mind. I have looked on three thousand years of human 
life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, 
if you will have patience with such a tract of time, I will 
set down. 

My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Giovanni, a 
Taorminian, who flourished in the last century. He was 
a man of vast erudition, and there is in his pages that 
Old-World learning which delights me. He was born 
before the days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. 
To allege an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to 
cite all writers who repeat the original source is to render 
truth impregnable. Rarely does he show any symptom 
of the modern malady of incredulity. Scripta littera is 
reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances 
to be at stake. He was really learned, and I do wrong 
to seem to diminish his authority. He was a patient 
investigator of manuscripts, and did important service to 
Sicilian history. The simplicity I have alluded to affects 
mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. A few 
statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might 
disturb the modern mind, but I own to finding in them 
the charm of lost things. In my mental provinces I 
welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake-dweller, 
and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science; but 
I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was 
brought up on quite other chronologies, and I still like 
a history that begins with the flood. I will not, however, 
ask any one of more serious mind to go back with 



20 HEART OF MAN 

Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, 
when the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and 
Demeter in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, 
and Charybdis lay stretched out under these bluffs 
watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that 
Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. 
Very dimly, it must be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani 
are seen arriving and driven, like all doomed races, south 
and west out of the land, and in their place the Siculi 
flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits 
from Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries 
these ..parse communities lived along these heights in fear 
of the sea pirates, and warred confusedly from their 
mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called because 
the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble 
a bull's horns; and they left no memory of themselves. 

Authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth 
century before our era. It is a bright burst; for then, 
down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young Greek 
mariners leaped on the strand. This was their first 
land-fall in Sicily; that rock, their Plymouth; and here, 
doubtless, the alarmed mountainers stood in their fast- 
ness and watched the bearers of the world's torch, and 
knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark island for 
evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the 
light, and were at last made friends with it — a chance 
that does not always befall. Then quickly rose the low- 
land city of Naxos, and by the river sprang up the temple 
to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine of the Sicilian 
Greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for 
a prosperous voyage when they would go across the 
sea, homeward. They were from the first a fighting race; 
and decade by decade the cloud of war grew heavier on 



TAORMINA 21 

each horizon, southward from Syracuse and northward 
from Messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with 
the rivalries of growing states — battles dimly discerned 
now. A single glimpse flashes out on the page of 
Thucydides. He relates that when once the Messenians 
threatened Naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers 
rushed down from the heights in great numbers to the 
relief of their Greek neighbors, and routed the enemy 
and slew many. This is the first bloodstain, clear and 
bright, on our Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the 
few relics of that age, that Pythagoras, on the journey 
he undertook to establish the governments of the Sicilian 
cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad lover of his 
frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at 
Metaponto the same day — a thing not to be done with- 
out magic? But at last we see plainly Alcibiades coast- 
ing along below, and the ill-fated Athenians wintering 
in the port, and horsemen going out from Naxos toward 
Etna on the side of Athens in the death-struggle of her 
glory. And then, suddenly, after the second three hun- 
dred years, all is over, the Greek city betrayed, sacked, 
destroyed, Naxos trodden out under the foot of Dionysius 
the tyrant. 

Other fortune awaited him a few years later when he 
came again, and our city (which, one knows not when, 
had been walled and fortified) stood its first historic 
siege. Dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. Snow 
and ice — I can hardly credit it — whitened and rough- 
ened these ravines, a new ally to the besieged; but 
the tyrant thought to betray them by a false security 
in such a season. On a bitter night, when clouds hooded 
the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he 
climbed unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices 



22 HEART OF MAN 

and gained two outer forts which gave footways to the 
walls; but the town aroused at the sound of arms and 
the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and 
fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others 
with wounds surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, 
with Dionysius among them, hard pressed, and staining 
the snow with his blood as he went. This was the city's 
first triumph. 

Not only with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, 
as a city should, with a great man. He was really great, 
this Andromachus. Do you not remember him out of 
Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his im- 
mortal memory among men? "This man was incom- 
parably the best of all those that bore sway in Sicily at 
that time, governing his citizens according to law and 
justice, and openly professing an aversion and enmity 
to all tyrants." Was the defeat of Dionysius the first 
of his youthful exploits, as some say? I cannot de- 
termine; but it is certain that he gathered the surviving 
exiles of Naxos, and gave them this plateau to dwell 
upon, and it was no longer called Mount Taurus, as had 
been the wont, but Tauromenium, or the Abiding-place 
of the Bull. A few years later Andromachus performed 
the signal action of his life by befriending Timoleon, as 
great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarch records the 
glory of. Timoleon had set out from Corinth, at the 
summons of his Greek countrymen, to restore the liberty 
of Syracuse, then tyrannized over by the second Diony- 
sius; and because Andromachus, in his stronghold of 
Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he "gave 
Timoleon leave to muster up his troops there and to 
make that city the seat of war, persuading the inhabitants 
to join their arms with the Corinthian forces and to 



TAORMINA 23 

assist them in the design of delivering Sicily." It was 
on our beach that Timoleon disembarked, and from our 
city he went forth to the conquest foretold by the wreath 
that fell upon his head as he prayed at Delphi, and by 
the prophetic fire that piloted his ship over the sea. 
The Carthaginians came quickly after him from Reggio, 
where he had eluded them, for they were in alliance with 
the tyrant; and from their vessels they parleyed with 
Andromachus in the port. With an insolent gesture, the 
envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning it lightly 
over, said that even so, and with such ease, would he 
overturn the little city; and Andromachus, mocking 
his hand-play, answered that if he did not leave the 
harbor, even so would he upset his galley. The 
Carthaginians sailed away. The city remained firm- 
perched. Timoleon prospered, brought back liberty to 
Syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, and gave to Sicily 
those twenty years of peace which were the flower of 
her Greek annals. Then, we must believe, rose the 
little temple on our headland, the Greek theater where the 
tongue of Athens lived, the gymnasium where the youths 
grew fair and strong. Then Taormina struck her coins: 
Apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape; for 
the gods and temples of the Naxians had become ours, 
and were religiously cherished; and with the rest was 
struck a coin with the Minotaur, our symbol. But of 
Andromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly 
adorned Greek city that then rose, we hear no more — 
a hero, I think, one of the true breed of the founders 
of states. 

But alas for liberty! A new tyrant, Agathocles, was 
soon on the Syracusan throne, and he won this city by 
friendly professions, only to empty it by treachery and 



24 HEART OF MAN 

murder; and he drove into exile Timaeus, the son of 
Andromachus. Timaeus? He, evidently, of my Casa 
Timeo. I know him now, the once famed historian 
whom Cicero praises as the most erudite in history of 
all writers up to his time, most copious in facts and 
various in comment, not unpolished in style, eloquent, 
and distinguished by terse and charming expression. 
Ninety years he lived in the Greek world, devoted him- 
self to history, and produced many works, now lost. The 
ancient writers read him, and from their criticism it is 
clear that he was marked by a talent for invective, was 
given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of 
truth. He introduced precision and detail into his art, 
and is credited with being the first to realize the im- 
portance of chronology and to seek exactness in it. He 
never saw again his lovely birthplace, and I easily for- 
give to the exile and the son of Andromachus the vigor 
with which he depicted the crimes of Agathocles and 
others of the tyrants. In our city, meanwhile, the 
Greek genius waning to its extinction, Tyndarion ruled; 
and in his time Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever 
invading power of Carthage. But he was little more 
than a shedder of blood; he accomplished nothing, and 
I name him only as one of the figures of our beach. 

The day of Greece was gone; but those two clouds 
of war still hung on the horizon, north and south, with 
ever darker tempest. Instead of Syracuse and Messina, 
Carthage and the new name of Rome now sent them forth, 
and over this island they encountered. Our city, true 
to its ancient tradition, became Rome's ever faithful ally, 
as you may read in the poem of Silius Italicus, and was 
dignified by treaty with the title of a confederate city; 
and of this fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that 



TAORMINA 25 

famous trial he thundered against Verres, the spoiler of 
our Sicilian province, and with the other cities defended 
this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of 
the Roman prsetor by overthrowing his statue in the 
market-place and sparing the pedestal as they said, to 
be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From the Roman 
age, however, I take but two episodes, for I find that 
to write this town's history were to write the history of 
half the Mediterranean world. When the slaves rose 
in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves on 
this hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege 
by the Roman consul as hardily as was ever its custom. 
Cruel they were, no doubt, and vindictive. With horror 
Monsignore relates that they were so resolved not to 
yield that, starving they ate their children, their wives, 
and one another; and he rejoices when they were at 
last betrayed and massacred, and this disgrace was wiped 
away. I hesitate. I cannot feel regret when those 
whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their 
oppressors. I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit 
to remember that the slaves, too, fought for liberty. I 
am sorry for those penned and dying men; their famine 
and slaughter in these walls were least horrible for their 
part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they 
did to what they were, and remembers that the civiliza- 
tion they violated had stripped them of humanity. After 
the slave, I make room — for whom else than imperial 
Augustus? Off this shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, 
and he thought easily to subdue the town above when 
he summoned it. But Taormina was always a loyal little 
place, and it would not yield without a siege. Then 
Augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple 
of Guiding Apollo that he might have the victory; and 



26 HEART OF MAN 

as he walked by the beach afterward a fish threw itself 
out of the water before him — an omen, said the diviners, 
that even so the Pompeians, who held the seas, after many- 
turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. 
Pompey returned with a fleet, and in these waters again 
the battle was fought and Augustus lost it, and the siege 
was raised. But when a third time the trial of naval 
strength was essayed, and the cause of the Pompeians 
ruined, Augustus remembered the city that had defied 
him, sent its inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman 
colony in its place. Latin was now the language here. 
The massive grandeur of Roman architecture replaced 
the old Greek structures. The amphitheater was en- 
larged and renewed in its present form, villas of luxury 
bordered the coasts as in Campania, and coins were struck 
in the Augustan name. 

The Roman domination in its turn slowly moved to 
its fall; and where should the new age begin more fitly 
than in this city of beginnings? As of old the Greek 
torch first gleamed here, here first on Sicilian soil was 
the Cross planted. The gods of Olympus had many tem- 
ples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity 
even in those days; but if the monkish chronicles be 
credited, the new faith signalized its victory rather over 
three strange idolatries — the worship of Falcone, of 
Lissone, and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to be- 
lieve that the citizens were accustomed to sacrifice three 
youths annually to Falcone; and as for the other two 
deities, little is known of them except that their destruc- 
tion marked the advent of the young religion. Pancrazio 
was the name of him who was destined to be our patron 
saint through the coming centuries. He was born in 
Antioch, and when a child of three years, going with 



TAORMINA 27 

his father into Judaea, he had seen the living Christ; now, 
grown into manhood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread 
the gospel in the isles of the sea. He disembarked on 
our beach, and forthwith threw Lissone's image into the 
waves and with it a holy dragon which was coiled about 
it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and he 
shattered with his cross the great idol Scamandro: and 
so Taormina became Christian, welcomed St. Peter on 
his way to Rome, and entered on the long new age. 
It was here, as elsewhere, the age of martyrs — Pancrazio 
first, and after him Geminiano, guided hither with his 
mother by an angel; and then San Nicone, who suffered 
with his one hundred and ninety-nine brother monks, 
and Sepero and Corneliano with their sixty; the age of 
monks — Luca, who fled from his bridal to live on Etna, 
with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple- 
minded Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, of whom there 
is more to be recorded; the age of bishops, heard in 
Roman councils and the palace of Byzantium, of whom 
two only are of singular interest — Zaccaria, who was 
deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all 
the succession, once a great figure in the disputes of 
East and West; and Procopio, whom the Saracens slew, 
for the Crescent now followed the Cross. 

The ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of 
Africa. The Saracens were in the land, and every city 
had fallen except Syracuse and Taormina. For sixty 
years the former held out, and in our city for yet another 
thirty, the sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the 
impending destruction were first seen by that St. Elia 
already mentioned, who wandered hither, and was dis- 
pleased by the manners and morals of the citizens. I 
am sorry to record that Monsignore believed his report, 



28 HEART OF MAN 

for only here is there mention of such a matter. "The 
citizens," says my author, "lived in luxury and pleasure 
not becoming to a state of war. They saw on all sides 
the fields devastated, houses burnt, wealth plundered, 
cities given to the flames, friends and companions killed 
or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, 
that did not rule unpunished among them." Therefore 
the saint preached the woe to come, and, turning to 
the governor, Constantine Patrizio, in his place in the 
cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people. 
"Let the philosophy of the Gentiles," he exclaimed, "be 
your shame. Epaminondas, that illustrious condottiere, 
strictly restrained himself from intemperance, from every 
lust, every allurement of pleasure. So, also, Scipio, the 
Roman leader, was valorous through the same continence 
as Epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal 
victory, one over the Spartans, the other over the Cartha- 
ginians, and both erected immortal trophies." He prom- 
ised them mercy with repentance, but ended threaten- 
ingly: "So far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to 
you all that has been divinely revealed to me. If you 
believe my words, like the penitents of Nineveh, you 
shall find mercy; if you despise my admonitions, bound 
and captive you shall be reduced to the worst slavery." 
He prophesied yet more in private. He went to the 
house of a noble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him as 
a father, and, lying in bed, he said to him: "Do you see, 
Crisone, the bed in which I now lie? In this same bed 
shall Ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and the 
walls of the rooms shall see many of the most distin- 
guished persons of this city all together put to the edge 
of the sword." Then he left the house and went to the 
square in the center of the city, and, standing there, he 



TAORMINA 29 

lifted his garments above the knee. Whereupon simple 
Daniele, who always followed him about, marveling asked, 
"What does this thing mean, father?" The old man had 
his answer ready, "Now I see rivers of blood running, 
and these proud and magnificent buildings which you 
see exalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by 
the Saracens." And the monk fled from the doomed 
city, like a true prophet, and went overseas. 

The danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than 
it must always have been where the prayer for defense 
against the Saracens had gone up for a hundred years 
in the cathedral. The governor, however, had taken 
pains to add to the strength of the city by strong forti- 
fications upon Mola. Ahulabras came under the walls 
but gave over the ever unsuccessful attempt to take the 
place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond the straits. 
When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, 
as the Saracens called it, had again been passed by, he 
cried out upon his son, "He is degenerate, degenerate! 
He took his nature from his mother and not from his 
father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword 
would not have spared the Christians!" Therefore he 
recalled him to the home government, and came himself 
and sat down before the city. The garrison was small 
and insufficient, but, says my author, following old 
chronicles, "youths, old men, and children, without dis- 
tinction of age, sex, or condition, fearing outrage and 
all that slavery would expose them to, all spontaneously 
offered themselves to fight in this holy war even to 
death: with such courage did love of country and re- 
ligious zeal inspire the citizens." Ibrahim had other 
weapons than the sword. He first corrupted the cap- 
tains of the Greek fleet, who were afterward condemned 



30 HEART OF MAN 

for the treason at Byzantium. Then, all being ready, 
he promised some Ethiopians of his army, who are de- 
scribed as of a ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that 
he would give them the city for booty, besides other 
gifts, if they would devote themselves to the bold under- 
taking. The catastrophe deserves to be told in Mon- 
signore's own words: 

"This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the 
riches of the Taorminians and the promises of the king, 
with the aid of the traitors entered unexpectedly into 
the city, and with bloody swords and mighty cries and 
clamor assailed the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, 
having entered with all his army by a secret gate under 
the fortress of Mola, thence called the gate of the Sara- 
cens, raged against the citizens with such unexpected and 
cruel slaughter that not only neither the weakness of 
sex, nor tender years, nor reverence for hoary age, but 
not even the abundance of blood that like torrents flowed 
down the ways, touched to pity that ferocious heart. The 
soldiers, masters of the beautiful and wealthy city, 
divided among them the riches and goods of the citizens 
according as to each one the lot fell; they leveled to the 
ground the magnificent buildings; public or private, 
sacred or profane, all that were proudest for amplitude, 
construction, and ornament; and that not even the 
ruins of ancient splendor should remain, all that had 
survived they gave to the flames." 

This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is the one 
the Taorminians cherish as the culmination of their past. 
In the Greek, the Roman, and the early Christian ages 
it had flourished, as both its ruins and its history attest, 



TAORMINA 31 

and much must have yet survived from tnose times; 
while its station as the only Christian stronghold in the 
island would naturally have attracted wealth hither for 
safety. In this first sack of the Saracens, the ancient 
city must have perished, but the destruction could hardly 
have been so thorough as is represented, since some of 
the churches themselves, in their present state, show 
Byzantine workmanship. 

There remains one bloody and characteristic episode 
to Ibrahim's victory. The king, says the Arab chron- 
icler, was pious and naturally compassionate, but on this 
occasion he forgot his usual mildness. In the midst of 
fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the 
caverns of the hills, and they dragged forth many 
prisoners, among whom was the Bishop Procopio. The 
king spoke to him gently and nobly, " Because you are 
wise and old, O Bishop, I exhort you with soft words 
to obey my advice, and to have foresight for your own 
safety and that of your companions; otherwise you shall 
suffer what your fellow-citizens have suffered from me. 
If you will embrace my laws, and deny the Christian 
religion, you shall have the second place after me, and 
shall be more dear to me than all the Agarenes." The 
prelate only smiled. Then, full of wrath, the king said: 
"Do you smile while you are my prisoner? Know you 
not in whose presence you are?" "I smile truly," came 
the answer, "because I see you are inspired by a demon 
who puts these words into your mouth." Furious, the 
king called to his attendants, "Quick, break open his 
breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and under- 
stand the secrets of his mind." While the command 
was being executed, Procopio reproved the king and 
comforted his companions. "The tyrant, swollen with 



32 HEART OF MAN 

rage, and grinding his teeth/' says the narrative, "bar- 
barously offered him the torn-out heart that he might 
eat it." Then he bade them strike off the bishop's head 
(who, we are told, was already half dead), and also the 
heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies all 
together. And as St. Pancrazio of old had thrown the 
holy dragon into the sea, so now were his own ashes 
scattered to the winds of heaven; and Ibrahim, having 
accomplished his work, departed. 

Some of the citizens, however, had survived, and 
among them Crisione, the host of St. Elia. He went to 
bear the tidings to the saint; and being now assured of 
the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man, asked 
him to foretell his future. He met the customary fate 
of the curious in such things. "I foresee," said the dis- 
comfortable saint, "that within a few days you will die." 
And to make an end of St. Elia with Crisione, let me 
record here the simple Daniele's last act of piety to his 
master. It is little that in such company he fought with 
devils, or that after he had written with much labor a 
beautiful Psalter, the old monk bade him fling it and 
worldly pride together over the cliff into a lake. Such 
episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by making 
a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously 
unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's 
bottom. But it was a mind singularly inventive of pen- 
ance that led the dying saint to charge poor Daniele to 
bear the corpse on his back a long way over the moun- 
tains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult 
thing to do. Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, 
more fortunate than Crisione, watched their opportunity, 
and, at a moment when the garrison was weak, entered, 
seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the 



TAORMINA 33 

Greek emperor once more. He could not maintain war 
with the Saracens, but by a treaty made with them he 
secured his faithful Taorminians in the possession of the 
city. After forty years of peace under this treaty it 
was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christ- 
mas night. Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens 
were sent by the victors into slavery in Africa. Greek 
troops, however, soon retook the city in a campaign that 
opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swift disaster; 
but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual 
siege, and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of 
its citizens and the now thrice-repeated fire and ruin 
of Saracenic victory, we may well believe that, though 
it remained the seat of a governor, little of the city was 
left except its memory. Its name even was changed to 
Moezzia. 

The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, 
until the landing of Count Roger, the Norman, the great 
hero of medieval Sicily, who recovered the island to 
the Christian faith. Taormina, true to its tradition, was 
long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory 
warfare Count Roger sat down before it with determina- 
tion. He surrounded it with a circumvallation of twenty- 
two fortresses connected by ramparts and bridges, and 
cut off all access by land or sea. Each day he inspected 
the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, 
laid an ambush for him in some young myrtles where 
the path he followed had a very narrow passage over 
the precipices. They rushed out on him, and, as he 
was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not 
their cries attracted one Evandro, a Breton, who, coming, 
and seeing the chief's peril, threw himself between, and 
died in his place. Count Roger was not forgetful of 



34 HEART OF MAN 

this noble action. He recovered the body, held great 
funeral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the 
church. The story appealed so to the old chronicler 
Malaterra, that he told it in both prose and verse. 
After seven months the city surrendered, and the iron cross 
was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. 
It is a sign of the ruin which had befallen that the 
city now lost its bishopric and was ecclesiastically annexed 
to another see. 

Taormina, compared with what it had been, was now 
a place of the desert; but not the less for that did the 
tide of war rage round it for five hundred years to come. 
It was like a rock of the sea over which conflicting billows 
break eternally. I will not narrate the feudal story of 
internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every reli- 
gious order set up monasteries upon the beautiful hill- 
sides, of whose life little is now left but the piles of 
books in old bindings over which my friend the librarian 
keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are 
left. Among both the nobles and the fathers were 
some examples of heroism, sacrifice, and learning, but 
their deeds and virtues may sleep unwaked by me. The 
kings and queens who took refuge here, and fled again, 
Messenian foray and Chiaramontane faction, shall go 
unrecorded. I must not, however, in the long roll of the 
famous figures of our beach forget that our English 
Richard the Lion-hearted was entertained here by 
Tancred in crusading days; and of notable sieges let me 
name at least that which the city suffered for its loyalty 
to the brave generous Manfred when the Messenians 
surprised and wasted it, and that which with less destruc- 
tion the enemies of the second Frederick inflicted on it, 
and that of the French under Charles II., who contrary 



TAORMINA 35 

to his word, gave up the surrendered city to the soldiery 
for eight whole days — a terrible sack, of which Mon- 
signore has heard old men tell. What part the citizens 
took in the Sicilian Vespers, and how the Parliament that 
vainly sought a king for all Sicily was held here, and 
in later times the marches of the Germans, Spaniards, 
and English — these were too long a tale. With one 
more signal memory I close this world-history, as it began, 
with a noble name. It was from our beach yonder that 
Garibaldi set out for Italy in the campaign of Aspro- 
monte; hither he was brought back, wounded, to the 
friendly people, still faithful to that love of liberty which 
flowed in the old Taorminian blood. 

I shut my books ; but to my eyes the rock is scrip tured 
now. What a leaf it is from the world-history of man 
upon the planet! Every race has splashed it with blood; 
every faith has cried from it to heaven. It is only a 
hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of 
such a city, lying somewhat aside and out of common 
vision, the course of human fate may be more simply 
impressive than in the story of world-cities. Athens, 
Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, are great centers 
of history; but in them the mind is confused by the 
multiplicity and awed by the majesty of events. Here 
on this bare rock there is no thronging of illustrious 
names, and little of that glory that conceals imperial 
crime, the massacre of armies, and the people's woe. 
Again I use the figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set 
here in the midst of the Mediterranean world, washed 
by all the tides of history, beat on by every pitiless storm 
of the passion of man for blood. The torch of Greece, 
the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Cres- 
cent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, 



36 HEART OF MAN 

from Greek democracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled 
it in turn; Roman law and feudal custom had it in 
charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all its historic 
forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate 
at moments the hard human lot. And what has been the 
end? Go down into the streets; go out into the villages; 
go into the country-side. The men will hardly look up 
from their burdens, the women will seldom stop to ask 
alms, but you will see a degradation of the human form 
that speaks not of the want of individuals, of one genera- 
tion, or of an age, but of the destitution of centuries 
stamped physically into the race. There is, as always, a 
prosperous class, men well to do, the more fortunate 
and better-born; but the common people lead toilsome 
lives, and among them suffering is widespread. Three 
thousand years of human life, and this the result! Yet 
I see many indications of a brave patriotism in the com- 
munity, an effort to improve general conditions, to arouse, 
to stimulate, to encourage — the spirit of free and united 
Italy awakening here, too, with faith in the new age of 
liberty and hope of its promised blessings. And for a 
sign there stands in the center of the poor fishing-village 
yonder a statue of Garibaldi. 



VI 

The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, warm, 
and clear, and every hour tempts me forth to wander 
about the hills. It is not spring, but the hesitancy that 
holds before the season changes; yet each day there are 
new flowers — not our delicate wood flowers, but larger 
and coarser of fiber, and it adds a charm to them that 
I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and 



TAORMINA 37 

here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a 
windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and 
solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards 
there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than 
seen, so vague is it — but it is there. I go wandering 
by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, 
under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags; now on 
our cape, among the majestic rocks, I watch the swaying 
of the smooth deep-violet waters below, changing into 
indigo as they lap the rough clefts, or I loiter on the beach 
to see the fishers about their boats, weatherworn mariners, 
and youths in the fair strength of manly beauty, like 
athletes of the old world : and always I bring back some- 
thing for memory, something unforeseen. 

I have ever found this uncertainty a rare pleasure of 
travel. It is blessed not to know what the gods will 
give. I remember once in other days I left the beach of 
Amalfi to row away to the isles of the Sirens, farther 
down the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave-wild 
morning, and I strained my sight, as every headland of 
the high cliff-coast was rounded, to catch the first glimpse 
of the low isles; and there came by a country boat-load 
of the peasants, and in the bows, as it neared and passed, 
I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and dreaming 
eyes, motionless save for the dipping prow — a figure 
out of old Italian pictures, some young St. John, in- 
expressibly beautiful. I have forgotten how the isles of 
the Sirens looked, but that boy's face I shall never forget. 
It is such moments that give the Italy of the imagination 
its charm. Here, too, I have similar experiences. A 
day or two ago, when the bright weather began, I was 
threading the rough edge of a broken path under the 
hill, and clinging to the rock with my hand. Suddenly 



38 HEART OF MAN 

a figure rose just before me, where the land made out a 
little farther on a point of the crag, so strange that I 
was startled; but straightway I knew the goatherd, the 
curling locks, the olive face, the garments of goatskin and 
leather on his limbs. It came on me like a flash — eccola 
the country of Theocritus ! 

I have never seen it set down among the advantages 
of travel that one learns to understand the poets better. 
To see courts and governments, manners and customs, 
works of architecture, statues and pictures and ruins — 
this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand 
tour; but though I have diligently sought such obvious 
and common aims, and had my reward, I think no gain 
so great as that I never thought of, the light which travel 
sheds upon the poets ; unless, indeed, I should except that 
stronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the 
imagination which comes from familiar life with pictures, 
and statues, and kindred physical renderings of art. 
This latter advantage must necessarily be more narrowly 
availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiar tem- 
perament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open 
and common to all who are not immersed in the material- 
ism of their own lives, and whatever helps to unlock the 
poetic treasures of other lands for our possession may be 
an important part of life. I think none can fully taste 
the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of English song even, 
until he has wandered in the lanes and fields of the 
mother-country; and in the case of foreign, and especially 
of the ancient, poets, so much of whose accepted and 
assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is very great. 
I had trodden many an Italian hillside before I noticed 
how subtly Dante's landscape had become realized in 
my mind as a part of nature. I own to believing that 



TAORMINA 39 

Virgil's storms never blew on the sea until once, near 
Salerno, as I rode back from Psestum, there came a storm 
over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted — such 
masses of ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their 
broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a change 
beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such an inde- 
scribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, 
nor red, but a commingling of all these — a revelation of 
the wrath of color ! The waves were wild with the fallen 
tempest; quick and heavy the surf came thundering on 
the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished, 
and the dark rain came down; and I said, " 'Tis one of 
VirgiPs storms." Such a one you will find also in 
Theocritus, where he hymns the children of Leda, suc- 
corers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set and 
rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of 
storms. The winds raise huge billows about their stern, 
yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind wills, and 
cast them into the hold of the ship, and shatter both bul- 
warks, while with the sail hangs all the gear confused and 
broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts 
and by showers of iron hail." 

I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as 
it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of 
all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest 
for him without the secret to enter. Yet here I find it 
all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled 
it. Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it 
glimpses at times from the hills and the campr.gna. 
Descending under the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, 
and turned and saw on the neighboring slopes the shep- 
herd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then 
the centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard 



40 HEART OF MAN 

the world's morning notes. That was a single moment; 
but here, day-long is the idyl world. I read the old 
verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in. 
The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as 
I meet with wherever I turn, and the water counts in the 
landscape as in the poems. It is always tumbling over 
rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded forms among 
the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or 
dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. 
The run that comes down from Mola, the torrent under 
the olive and lemon branches toward Letojanni, the more 
open course in the ravine of the mill down by Giardini, 
the simitar of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the cam- 
pagna in the meadows, and that further fiume freddo, the 
cold stream — "chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna 
sends down from the white snow, a draught divine," — 
each of these seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so 
that it does not resemble its neighbors. But all alike mur- 
mur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real. 

On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of 
much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the 
human life that enters into them. No idyl appeals so 
directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of the 
two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go 
down to the shore; you will find the old men still at their 
toil, the same implements, the same poverty, the same 
sentiment for the heart. Often as I look at them I recall 
the old words, while the goats hang their heads over the 
scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily 
on the sands. 

"Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and 
slept; they had strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in 



TAORMINA 41 

their wattled cabin, and there lay against the leafy wall. 
Beside them were strewn the instruments of their toil- 
some hands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the 
hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the 
weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two 
oars, and an old cobble upon props. Beneath their heads 
was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. 
Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The 
threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, 
all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their 
sentinel ; they had no neighbor by them, but against their 
narrow cabin gently floated up the sea." 

This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say 
that the idyl is touched more with the melancholy of 
human fate for us than for the poet. Poverty such as 
this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It is a 
terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in 
wan limbs and hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping 
eyes — despair made flesh. How long has it suffered 
here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers and 
gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He 
spreads before us the hills and fountains, and fills the 
scene with shepherds, and maidens, and laughing loves, 
and among the rest are these two poor old men. The 
shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now 
as then. With the rock and sea it, too, endures. 

A few traces of the old myths also survive on the land- 
scape. Not far from here, down the coast, the rocks that 
the Cyclops threw after the fleeing mariners are still to 
be seen near the shore above which he piped to Galatea. 
Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But 
now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of 



42 HEART OF MAN 

Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the 
praises of Hiero, and the deeds of Herakles: these all 
belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its civilization and 
art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the 
campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous 
praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, 
graceful loves. Fain would I recover the breath of that 
springtime; but while from my foot "every stone upon 
the way spins singing," make what speed I can, I come 
not to the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among the 
blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, and night 
falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on my lips, as at some 
shrine whence the god is gone, is B ion's prayer: "Hes- 
perus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam — ■ 
dear Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dim- 
mer as much than the moon as thou art among the stars 
preeminent, hail, friend!" Dead now is that ritual. 
Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing 
Daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart 
is young. Sweet was his flute's first triumph over Menal- 
cas: "Then was the boy glad, and leaped high, and 
clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawn leaps 
about his mother"; but sweeter was the unwon victory 
when he strove with Damoetas: "Then Damcetas kissed 
Daphnis, as he ended his song, and he gave Daphnis a 
pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautiful flute. Damoetas 
fluted, and Daphnis piped; the herdsmen and anon the 
calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. Neither 
won the victory, but both were invincible." And him, 
too, I miss who loved his friend, and wished that they 
twain might "become a song in the ears of all men un- 
born," even for their love's sake; and prayed, "Would, 
O Father Cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that 



TAORMINA 43 

this might be, and that when two hundred generations 
have sped, one might bring these tidings to me by Acheron, 
the irremeable stream. 'The loving-kindness that was be- 
tween thee and thy gracious friend is even now in all 
men's mouths, and chiefly on the lips of the young'." Hill 
and fountain and pine, the gray sea and Mother Etna, are 
here; but no children gather in the land, as once about 
the tomb of Diodes at the coming in of the spring, con- 
tending for the prize of the kisses — "Whoso most 
sweetly touches lip to lip, laden with garlands he re- 
turneth to his mother. Happy is he who judges those 
kisses of the children." Lost over the bright furrows of 
the sea is Europa riding on the back of the divine bull as 
Moschus beheld her — "With one hand she clasped the 
beast's great horn, and with the other caught up the 
purple fold of her garment, lest it might trail and be 
wet in the hoar sea's infinite spray"; and from the 
border-land of mythic story, that was then this world's 
horizon, yet more faintly the fading voice of Hylas 
answers the deep-throated shout of Herakles. Faint now 
as his voice are the voices of the shepherds who are 
gone, youth and maiden and children; dimly I see them, 
vaguely I hear them; at last there remains only "the 
hoar sea's infinite spray." And will you say it was in 
truth all a dream? Were the poor fishermen in their 
toil alone real, and the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily 
gave a local habitation and a name? It was Virgil's 
dream and Spenser's ; and some secret there was — some- 
thing still in our breasts — that made it immortal, so 
that to name the Sicilian Muses is to stir an infinite, 
longing tenderness in every young and noble heart that 
the gods have softened with sweet thoughts. 

And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that 



44 HEART OF MAN 

Taormina bore. She, too, in her centuries has had her 
poet. Perhaps none who will see these words ever gave 
a thought to the name and fame of Cornelius Severus, 
Few of his works remain, and little is known of his 
life. He is said to have been the friend of Pollio, and 
to have been present in the Sicilian war between Augustus 
and Sextus Pompey. He wrote the first book of an epic 
poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought 
that, had the entire work been continued at the same 
level, he would have held the second place among the 
Latin epic poets. He wrote also heroic songs, of which 
fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, 
which Seneca quotes, saying of him, "No one out of 
so many talented men deplored the death of Cicero better 
than Cornelius Severus." Some dialogues in verse also 
seem to have been written by him. These fragments 
may not be easily obtained. But take down your Virgil; 
and, if it be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, 
you will find at the very end, last of the shorter pieces 
ascribed to the poet, one of the length of a book of the 
"Georgics," called "Etna." This is the work of Cornelius 
Severus. An early death took from him the perfection 
of his genius and the hope of fame; but happy was the 
fortune of him who wrote so well that for centuries his 
lines were thought not unworthy of Virgil, whose name 
still shields this Taorminian verse from oblivion. 



VII 

It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen the sunrise 
from my old station by the Greek temple, and watched 
the throng of cattle and men gathered on the distant 
beach of Letojanni and darkening the broad bed of the 



TAORMINA 45 

dry torrent that there makes down to the sea, and I 
wished I were among them, for it is their annual fair; 
and still I dwell on every feature of the landscape that 
familiarity has made more beautiful. The afternoon I 
have dedicated to a walk to Mola. It is a pleasant, easy 
climb, with the black ancient wall of the city on the 
left, where it goes up the face of the castle-rock, and 
on the right the deep ravine, closed by Monte Venere 
in the west. All is very quiet; a silent, silent country! 
There are few birds or none, and indeed I have heard no 
bird-song since I have been here. Opposite, on the other 
side of the wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in 
strange fashion to the cliff, where it seems goats could 
hardly cling; but the unwieldy, awkward creatures move 
with sure feet, and seem wholly at home, pasturing on 
the bare precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a 
narrow stream, deep below me, but I see the women of 
Mola washing by the old fountain which is its source. 
There is no other sign of human life. The fresh spring 
flowers, large and coarse, but bright-colored, are all I 
have of company, and the sky is blue and the air like 
crystal. So I go up, ever up, and at last am by the gate 
of Mola, and enter the stony-hearted town. A place 
more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldom seen. There 
are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved 
ways. If you can fancy a prison turned inside out like 
a glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the sunlight, 
which yet seems sunlight in a prison, and silence over 
all — that is Mola. The ruins of the fortress are near 
the gate on the highest point of the crag. Within is 
a barren spot — a cistern, old foundations, and some 
broken walls. Look over the battlement westward, and 
you will see a precipice that one thinks only birds could 



46 HEART OF MAN 

assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on all sides, 
you will understand what an inaccessible fastness this 
was, and cannot be surprised at its record of defense. 

Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place of man 
upon the hill, and it was the securest retreat. Mon- 
signore, indeed, believes that Ham, the son of Noah, 
who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; 
but I do not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it 
seems likely that this was the original Siculian strong- 
hold before the coming of the Greeks, and the building 
of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins that exist are 
part of the fortress made by that governor who lost the 
city to the Saracens, to defend it against them on this 
side; and here it stood for nigh a thousand years, like 
the citadel itself, an impregnable hold of war. It seldom 
yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more 
than once, when Taormina was sacked, its citadel and 
Mola remained untaken and unconquerable on their ex- 
treme heights. I shall not tell its story; but one brave 
man once commanded here, and his name shall be its 
fame now, and my last tale of the Taorminian past. 

He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the days when 
the Messenians revolted against the chancellor of Queen 
Margaret. He was placed over this castle; and when a 
certain Count Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy 
to murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he was 
given into Matteo's charge, and imprisoned here. The 
Messenians came and surprised the lower city of Taor- 
mina, but they could not gain Mola nor persuade Matteo 
to yield Riccardo up to them. So they thought to over- 
come his fidelity cruelly. They took his wife and chil- 
dren, who were at Messina, threw them into a dungeon, 
and condemned them to death. Then they sent Matteo's 



TAORMINA 47 

brother-in-law to treat with him. But when the count 
knew the reason of the visit he said: "It seems to me 
that you little value the zeal of an honest man who, loyal 
to his office, does not wish, neither knows how, to break 
his sworn faith. My wife and children would look on 
me with scornful eyes should I be renegade; for shame 
is not the reward that sweetens life, but burdens it. If 
the Messenians stain themselves with innocent blood, I 
shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, but the 
heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse." Then 
he was silent. But treachery could do what such threats 
failed to accomplish. One Gavaretto was found, who 
unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was already escaping 
when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in 
hand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, 
"to save his wages," struck Matteo in the body, and the 
faithful count fell dead in his blood. I thought of this 
story, standing there, and nothing else in the castle's 
legend seemed worthy of memory in comparison, from 
its mystic beginning until that night, near two centuries 
ago, when the thunderbolt fell on it, igniting its store of 
powder, and blew it utterly to fragments with a great 
explosion. 

The castle of Taormina on the eastward height is 
easily reached by a ridge that runs toward it on the 
homeward track. Along the way are seen the caves 
so often mentioned in the records of the city as the 
refuge of the people in times of disaster. The castle 
itself, much larger and more important than Mola, is 
wholly in ruins. The walls stand, with some broken 
stairways, and a room or two, massive and desolate, re- 
mains. Of its history I have found no particular men- 
tion, but here must always have been the citadel. Once 



48 HEART OF MAN 

more from its open platform I gazed on the fair country 
it had guarded, while the snows of Etna began to be 
touched with sunset; and as my hand lay on the ruined 
battlement, for which how many thousands died bloody 
deaths, again the long past rose from the rock. I saw 
the young Greeks raising Apollo's altar by the river- 
bank. I saw Dionysius in the winter night, staining the 
snow from the wound in his breast as he fled down the 
darkness, and the Norman soldier dying for Roger beneath 
the simitars by the young myrtles. I saw the citizens 
in the market-place overthrowing Verres' statue, the monk 
Elia with his lifted garment, the bishop in his murder 
before Ibrahim. I wondered at the little port that was 
large enough to hold the fleets of Athens, of Carthage, 
and of Augustus, and at the strip of beach trodden by 
so many famous men on heroic enterprises. There the 
fishers were drawing up their boats, coming home at the 
day's close from that toil of the sea which has outlived 
gods and martyrs and empires. The snows of Etna 
were now aflame with sunset, and the high clouds 
trembled with swift and mighty radiance, and league after 
league the sea took on the pale rose-color. Descending, 
I passed through the dark cleft between the castle and 
the silent, deserted church of the hermitage by its side, 
and, in a moment, again the vision burst on me, and in 
its glow I went down the rock-face by the terraces under 
almond blossoms. Softly the sea changed through every 
tender color, bathing beach and headland, and strange 
lights fell upon the crags from the mild heaven, and all 
the Taorminian land was filled with bloom; then the 
infinite beauty, slowly fading, withdrew the scene, and 
sweetly it parted from my eyes. 



TAORMINA 49 

VIII 

Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the 
night. I hear the long roar of the breakers; I see the 
flickering fishers' lights, and Etna pale under the stars. 
The place is full of ghosts. In the darkness I seem to hear 
vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of 
many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Sicu- 
lian and the lost Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse 
jargon of barbaric slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused 
with strange African dialects, Norman and Sicilian, French 
and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp 
battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low- 
ravines, the death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within 
these walls, ringing on the hard rock and falling to silence 
only to rise more full with fiercer pain — century after 
century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. My 
fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted castle- 
rock the triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, 
and Roman in the age-long duel, and as these fade, the 
springing brands of Byzantine, Arab, and Norman, and 
yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, and Sicily; 
and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this 
done hillside. "Oh, wherefore?" I whisper; and all is 
silent save the surge still lifting round the coast the far 
voices of the old Ionian sea. I have wondered that the 
children of Etna should dwell in its lovely paradise, as 
I thought how often, how terribly, the lava has poured 
forth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror 
of volcanic eruption overwhelmed the land. Yet, sum it 
all, pang by pang, all that Etna ever wrought of woe to 
the sons of men, the agonies of her burnings, the terrors 
of her living entombments, all her manfold deaths at 



50 HEART OF MAN 

once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that 
has flowed on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the 
infinite pain here suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, 
it is not thou that man should fear! He should fear his 
brother-man. 

IX 

The stars were paling over Etna, white and ghostly, 
as I came out to depart. In the dark street I met a 
woman with a young boy clinging to her side. Her black 
hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom was 
scantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her 
ankles and her feet. She was still young, and from her 
dark, sad face her eyes met mine with that fixed look 
of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the child, half 
naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. 
What brought her there at that hour, alone with her 
child? She seemed the epitome of the human life I was 
leaving behind, come forth to bid farewell; and she passed 
on under the shadows of the dawn. The last star faded 
as I went down the hollow between the spurs. Etna 
gleamed white and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, 
and, as I dipped down, was gone. 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 

There was an old cry, Return to Nature! Let us 
rather return unto the soul. Nature is great, and her 
science marvelous; but it is man who knows it. In 
what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. Know thy- 
self, was the first command of reason; and wisdom was 
an ancient thing when the sweet influences of the Pleiades 
and the path of Arcturus with his sons were young in 
human thought. These late conquests of the mind in 
the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of 
stellar space, its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing 
of invisible forces, this new mortal knowledge, its sudden 
burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of achievement, 
thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid 
spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this 
means in human welfare, the sense of the increase of 
man's power springing from unsuspected and illimitable 
resources — all this has made us forgetful of truth that 
is the oldest heirloom of the race. In the balances of 
thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravita- 
tion measures. Man only is of prime interest to men; 
and man as a spirit, a creature but made in the likeness 
of something divine. The lapse of aeons touches us as 
little as the reach of space; even the building of our 
planet, and man's infancy, have the faint and distant 
reality of cradle records. Science may reconstruct the 
inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our mold, 

si 



52 HEART OF MAN 

and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical 
being we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to 
recognize a human past without some discipline in the 
arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and some proverbial 
lore handed down from sire to son. The tree of knowl- 
edge is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even 
the tamer of horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, 
elder than those twin guardians of the soul — the poet 
and the priest. Conscience and imagination were the 
pioneers who made earth habitable for the human spirit; 
they are still its lawgivers; and where they have lodged 
their treasures, there is wisdom. 

I desire to renew the long discussion of the nature and 
method of idealism by engaging in a new defense of 
poetry, or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as 
the means by which this wisdom, which is the soul's 
knowledge of itself, is stored up for the race in its most 
manifest, enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary 
tradition and association, a proud task. May I not take 
counsel of Spenser and be bold at the first door? Sidney 
and Shelley pleaded this cause. Because they spoke, must 
we be dumb? or shall not a noble example be put to its 
best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips? 
The old hunt is up in the Muses' bower; and I would fain 
speak for that learning which has to me been light. I use 
this preface not unwillingly in open loyalty to studies 
on which my youth was nourished, and the masters I then 
loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made elo- 
quent; my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they 
before drank from old fountains; but chiefly I name 
them as a reminder that the main argument is age-long; 
it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thus 
ceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 53 

our warring nature where conflict is perpetual. It goes 
on in the lives as well as on the lips of men. It is a 
question how to live as well as how to express life. Each 
race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but, change 
the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner 
of his few great thoughts. 

The defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that 
links them together in a long descent; but the battle is 
always to a present age. Continually something is be- 
coming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work 
of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, and con- 
signs them to dark closets. New times, new weapons, 
is the history of all warfare. The doubt of the validity of 
the ideal, never absent from any intellectual period, is 
active on all sides, and in more than one quarter passes 
into denial. Literature and the other arts of expression 
suffer throughout the world. To that point is it come 
that those of the old stock who believe that the imagina- 
tion exercises man's faculty at its highest pitch, and that 
the method of idealism is its law, are bid step down, while 
others more newly grounded in what belongs to literature 
possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the 
obliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown 
down, shall we learn what our predecessors never knew — 
to abdicate and abandon? I hear in the temples the 
footsteps of the departing gods — 

Di quibus imperium hoc steterat; 

but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of 
whom it was said that though one rose from the dead 
they would not believe — Plato, being dead, yet speaks, 
Shakespeare treads our boards, and (why should I hesi- 
tate?) Tennyson yet breathes among us though already 



54 HEART OF MAN 

immortal. That which convinced the master minds of 
antiquity and many in later ages is still convincing, if 
it be attended to; the old tradition is yet unbroken; 
therefore, because I was bred in this faith, I will try to 
set forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal 
ground of reason on which idealism rests. 

The specific question concerns literature and its method, 
but its import is not mainly literary. Life is the matter 
of literature ; and thence it comes that all leading inquiries 
to which literature gives rise probe for their premises 
to the roots of our being and expand in their issues to 
the unknown limits of human fate. It is an error to 
think of idealism as a thing remote, fantastic, and 
unsubstantial. It enters intimately into the lives of all 
men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at all 
except in their bodies. What is here proposed is neither 
speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in 
matter, universal in interest, and touches upon those 
things which men most should heed. I fear rather to 
incur the reproach of uttering truisms than paradoxes. 
But he does ill who is scornful of the trite. To be 
learned in commonplaces is no mean education. They 
make up the great body of the people's knowledge. They 
are the living words upon the lips of men from generation 
to generation; the real winged words; the matter of the 
unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libra- 
ries; the tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily, 
— happy the youth whose purse is stored with these 
broad pieces, current in every country and for every 
good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when 
it arises shows the use. It is with truth as with beauty — 
familiarity endears and makes it more precious. What 
is common is for that very reason in danger of neglect, 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 55 

and from it often flashes that divine surprise which most 
enkindles the soul. Why must Prometheus bring fire 
from heaven to savage man? Did it not sleep in the 
flint at his feet? How often, at the master stroke of 
life, has some text of Holy Scripture, which lay in the 
mind from childhood almost like the debris of memory, 
illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, or in- 
terpreted the sweetness of God's sunshine in the happy 
heart! Common as light is love, sang Shelley; and 
equally common with beauty and truth and love is all 
that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it and gives it 
power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the 
heart to understand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, 
silk and cotton, gold, silver and iron, steam and elec- 
tricity — were not all, like the spark, within arm's reach 
of savage man? The slow material progress of mankind 
through ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the 
individual soul in laying hold of and putting to use the 
resources of spiritual strength that are nigh unto it. 
The service of man to man in the ways of the spirit 
is, in truth, an act as simple as the giving of a cup of cold 
water to him who is athirst. 

Can there be any surprise when I say that the method 
of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual 
process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of 
incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the 
chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that 
in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the 
mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of 
thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation. Ex- 
perience is the matter of all knowledge. It is given 
to the mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever 
continuing, of impressions outward and inward. It is 



56 HEART OF MAN 

stored in the memory, and were memory tne only mental 
faculty, no other knowledge than this of particular facts 
in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the sole 
method of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. 
All literature would then be merely annals of the contents 
of successive moments in their order. Reason, however, 
intervenes. Its process is well known. In every object 
of perception, as it exists in the physical world and is 
given by sensation to our consciousness, there is both 
in itself and in its relations a likeness to other objects 
and relations, and this likeness the mind takes notice of; 
it thus analyzes the complex of experience, discerns the 
common element, and by this means classifies particular 
facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions 
— abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at 
these in the course of its normal operation. As soon as 
we think at all, we speak of white and black, of bird and 
beast, of distance and size — of uniformities in the be- 
havior of nature, or laws; by such classification of quali- 
ties, objects, and various relations, not merely in the 
sensuous but in every sphere of our consciousness, the 
mind simplifies its experience, compacts its knowledge, 
and economizes its energies. To this work it brings, 
also, the method of experiment. It then interferes arbi- 
trarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings 
that to pass which otherwise would not have been; and 
this method it uses to investigate, to illustrate what was 
previously known, and to confirm what was surmised. 
Its end, whether through observation or experiment, is 
to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, uni- 
versal more or less embracing as opposed to particulars, 
the units of thought as opposed to the units of phenomena. 
The body of these constitutes rational knowledge. 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 57 

Nature then becomes known, not as a series of impres- 
sions on the retina of sense merely, but as a system seized 
by the eye of reason; for the senses show man the aspect 
worn by the world as it is at the moment, but reason opens 
to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at 
every moment; and the instrument by which man rises 
from the phenomenal plane of experience to the necessary 
sphere of truth is the generalizing faculty whose operation 
has just been described. The office of the reason in 
the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in 
that experience which memory preserves in the mass — 
to penetrate, that is, to that mold of necessity in the 
world which phenomena, when they arise, must put on. 
The species once perceived, the mind no longer cares for 
the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer 
cares for the facts; for in these universals all particular 
instances, past, present, and to come, are contained in 
their significance. All sciences are advanced in propor- 
tion as they have thus organized their appropriate matter 
in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in 
proportion as there remains much in their provinces not 
yet so coordinated and systematized; and in their hier- 
archy, from astronomical physics downward, each takes 
rank according to the nature of the universals it deals 
with, as these are more or less embracing. 

The matter of literature — that part of total experi- 
ence which it deals with — is life; and, to confine atten- 
tion to imaginative literature where alone the question of 
idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative litera- 
ture deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's 
breast as distinguished from the outward and physical 
order with which science deals. The reason as here 
exercised organizes man's experience in this great tract 



58 HEART OF MAN 

of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of 
true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science 
it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, 
or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution 
and processes of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, 
without need of argument, of the highest consequence to 
mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all 
other knowledge; for to penetrate this inward or spiritual 
order, to grasp it with the mind and conform to it with 
the will, is not, as is the case with every other sort of 
knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected minds, 
but the daily business of all men in their lives. The 
method of the mind here is and must be the same with 
that by which it accomplishes its work elsewhere, its only 
method. Here, too, its concern is with the universal; 
its end is to know life — the life with which literature 
deals — not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in 
its necessary order, not phenomenally in the senses but 
rationally in the mind, not without relation in its mere 
procession but organically in its laws; and its instrument 
here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences 
and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty. 

One difference there is between scientific and imagi- 
native truth — a difference in the mode of statement. 
Science and also philosophy formulate truth and end in 
the formula; literature, as the saying is, clothes truth in 
a tale. Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the 
mind projects a world of its own, whose principle of 
being is that it reembodies general or abstract truth and 
presents it concretely to the eye of the mind, and in some 
arts gives it physical form. So, to draw an example from 
science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination 
the planet Neptune, he incarnated in matter a whole 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 59 

group of universal qualities and relations, all that go to 
make up a world, and in so doing he created as the poet 
creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his imagined 
world before he found the actual planet as there was of 
reality in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. 
This creation of the concrete world of art is the joint 
act of the imagination and the reason working in unison; 
and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed is 
sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power 
of the mind, in distinction from the scientific intellect 
which merely knows. The term is intended to convey 
at once the double phase, under one aspect of which 
the reason controls imagination, and under the other 
aspect the imagination formulates the reason; it is meant 
to free the idea, on the one hand, from that suggestion 
of abstraction implied by the reason, and to disembarrass 
it, on the other, of any connection with the irrational 
fancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily 
both concrete, correspondent to the realities of experience, 
and truthful, subject to the laws of the universe; it 
cannot amalgamate the actual with the unreal, it cannot 
in any way lie and retain its own nature. The use of 
this rational imagination is not confined to the world 
of art. It is only by its aid that we build up the horizons 
of our earthly life and fill them with objects and events 
beyond the reach of our senses. To it we are indebted 
for our knowledge of the greater part of others' lives, 
for our idea of the earth's surface and the doings of 
foreign nations, of all past history and its scene, and 
the events of primeval nature which were even before 
man was. So far as we realize the world at all beyond 
the limit of our private experience of it, we do so by 
the power of the imagination acting on the lines of 



60 HEART OF MAN 

reason. It fills space and time for us through all their 
compass. Nor is it less operative in the practical pur- 
suits of men. The scientist lights his way with it; the 
statesman forecasts reform by it, building in thought 
the state which he afterward realizes in fact; the entire 
future lives to us — and it is the most important part of 
life — only by its incantation. The poet acts no otherwise 
in employing it than the inventor and the speculator even, 
save that he uses it for the ends of reason instead of for 
his private interest. In some parts of this field there 
is, or was once, or will be, a physical parallel, an actuality, 
containing the verification of the imagined state of things ; 
but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conception of 
the reason just as normal, which is not the less real 
because it is a tissue of abstract thought. In art this 
governance of the imagination by the reason is funda- 
mental, and gives to the office of the latter a seeming 
primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on 
the universal element, the truth, as the substance of the 
artistic form. But in the light of this preliminary de- 
scription of the mental processes involved, let us take a 
nearer view of their particular employment in literature. 
Human life, as represented in literature, consists of 
two main branches, character and action. Of these, 
character, which is the realm of personality, is general- 
ized by means of type, which is ideal character; action, 
which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal 
action. It is convenient to examine the nature of these 
separately. A type, the example of a class, contains 
the characteristic qualities which make an individual 
one of that class; it does not differ in this elementary 
form from the bare idea of the species. The traits of 
a tree, for instance, exist in every actual tree, however 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 61 

stunted or imperfect; and in the type which condenses 
into itself what is common in all specimens of the class, 
these traits only exist; they constitute the type. Comic 
types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of some 
single human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations. 
The braggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one 
trait which is common to the class ; and in their portrayal 
this characteristic only is shown. In proportion as the 
traits are many in any character, the type becomes com- 
plex. In simple types attention is directed to some one 
vice, passion, or virtue, capable of absorbing a human life 
into itself. This is the method of Jonson, and, in 
tragedy, of Marlowe. As human energy displays itself 
more variously in a life, in complex types, the mind con- 
templates human nature in a more catholic way, with a 
less exclusive identification of character with specific 
trait, a more free conception of personality as only par- 
tially exhibited; thus, in becoming complex, types gather 
breadth and depth, and share more in the mystery of 
humanity as something incompletely known to us at 
the best. Such are the characters of Shakespeare. 

The manner in which types are arrived at and made 
recognizable in other arts opens the subject more fully 
and throws light upon their nature. The sculptor ob- 
serves in a group of athletes that certain physical habits 
result in certain molds of the body; and taking such 
characteristics as are common to all of one class, and 
neglecting such as are peculiar to individuals, he carves 
a statue. So permanent are the physical facts he relies 
upon that, centuries after, when the statue is dug up, 
men say without hesitation — here is the Greek runner, 
there the wrestler. The habit of each in life produces 
a bodily form which if it exists implies that habit; the 



62 HEART OF MAN 

reality here results from the operation of physical laws 
and can be physically rendered; the type is constituted 
of permanent physical fact. There are habits of the 
soul which similarly impress an outward stamp upon the 
face and form so certainly that expression, attitude, and 
shape authentically declare the presence of the soul that 
so reveals itself. In the Phidian Zeus was all awe; in 
the Praxitelean Hermes all grace, sweetness, tenderness; 
in the Pallas Athene of her people who carved or minted 
her image in statue, bas-relief, or coin, was all serene and 
grave wisdom; or, in the glowing and chastened colors 
of the later artistic time, the Virgin mother shines out, 
in Fra Angelico all adoration, in Bellini all beatitude, in 
Raphael all motherhood. The sculptor and the painter 
are restricted to the bodily signs of the soul's presence; 
but the poet passes into another and wider range of 
interpretation. He finds the soul stamped in its charac- 
teristic moods, words, actions. He then creates for the 
mind's eye Achilles, ^Eneas, Arthur; and in his verse are 
beheld their spirits rather than their bodies. 

These several sorts of types make an ascending series 
from the predominantly physical to the predominantly 
spiritual; but, from the present point of view, the arts 
which embody their creations in a material form should 
not be opposed to literature which employs the least 
intervention of sensation, as if the former had a physical 
and the last a spiritual content. All types have one com- 
mon element, they express personality; they have for 
the mind a spiritual meaning, what they contain of 
human character; they differ here only in fullness of 
representation. The most purely physical types imply 
spiritual qualities, choice, will, command — all the life 
which was a condition precedent to the bodily perfection 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 63 

that was its flower; and, though the eye rests on the 
beautiful form, it may discern through it the human soul 
of the athlete as in life; and, moreover, the figure may 
be represented in some significant act, or mood even, 
but this last is rare. The more plainly spiritual types, 
physically rendered, are most often shown in some such 
mood or act expressive in itself of the soul whose habit 
lives in the form it has molded. It is not that the 
plastic and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone 
and the canvas as well as humanize it bodily; equally 
with the poetic art they reveal character, but within 
narrower bounds. The limitation of these arts in em- 
bodying personality is one of scope, not of intention; 
and though it springs out of their use of material forms 
it does so in a peculiar way. It is not the employment 
of a physical medium of communication that differentiates 
them, for a physical medium of some sort is the only 
means of exchange between mind and mind; neither is 
it the employment of a physical basis, for all art, being 
concrete, rests on a physical basis — the world of imagi- 
nation is exhaled from things that are. The physical 
basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when it is 
enacted on the stage; but it is substantially the same 
whether beheld in thought or ocularly. 

The fact is that the limitation of sculpture and paint- 
ing and their kindred arts results from their use of the 
physical basis of life only partially, and not as a whole 
as literature uses it. They set forth their works in the 
single element of space; they exclude the changes that 
take place in time. The types they show are arrested, 
each in its moment; or if a story is told by a series of 
representations, it is a succession of such moments of 
arrested life. The method is that of the camera; what 



64 HEART OF MAN 

is given is a fixed state. But literature renders life in 
movement; it revolves life through its moments as 
rapidly as on the retina of sense; its method is that of 
the kinestoscope. It holds under its command change, 
growth, the entire energy of life in action; it can chase 
mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can speak 
the word, which is the most powerful instrument of 
man. Hence the types it shows by presenting moods, 
words, and acts with the least obstruction of matter and 
the slightest obligation to the active senses, are the most 
complete. They have broken the bonds of the flesh, of 
moment and place. They exhibit themselves in actions; 
they speak, and in dialogue and soliloquy set forth their 
states of mind lying before, or accompanying, or follow- 
ing their actions, thus interpreting these more fully. 
Action by itself reveals character; speech illumines it, 
and casts upon the action also a forward and a backward 
light. The lapse of time, binding all together, adds the 
continuous life of the soul. This large compass, which 
is the greatest reached by any art, rests on the wider 
command and more flexible control which literature exer- 
cises over that physical basis which is the common founda- 
tion of all the arts. Hence it abounds in complex types, 
just as other arts present simple types with more fre- 
quency. All types, however, in so far as they appeal 
to the mind and interpret the inward world, under which 
aspect alone they are now considered, have their physical 
nature, materially or imaginatively, even though it be 
solely visible beauty, in order to express personality. 

The type, in the usage of literature, must be further 
distinguished from the bare idea of the species as it has 
thus far been defined. It is more than this. It is not 
only an example; it is an example in a high state of 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 65 

development, if not perfect. The best possible tree, for 
instance, does not exist in nature, owing to a confused 
environment which does not permit its formation. In 
literature a type is made a high type either by intensity, 
if it be simple, or by richness of nature, if it be complex. 
Miserliness, braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, 
are the characters of comedy; a rich nature, such as 
Hamlet, showing variety of faculty and depth of experi- 
ence, is the hero of more profound drama. This truth, 
the necessity of high development in the type, underlay 
the old canon that the characters of tragedy should be 
of lofty rank, great place, and consequence in the world's 
affairs, preferably even of historic fame. The canon 
erred in mistaking one means of securing credible intens- 
ity or richness for the many which are possible. The 
end in view is to represent human qualities at their acme. 
In other times as a matter of fact persons highly placed 
were most likely to exhibit such development; birth, 
station, and their opportunities for unrestrained and con- 
spicuous action made them examples of the compass of 
human energy, passion, and fate. New ages brought 
other conditions. Shakespeare recognized the truth of 
the matter, and laid the emphasis where it belongs, upon 
the humanity of the king, not on the kingly office of the 
man. Said Henry V.: "I think the king is but a man 
as I am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me; the 
element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses 
have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in 
his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his 
appetites are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they 
stoop, they stoop with like wing." Such, too, was Lear 
in the tempest. And from the other end of the scale hear 
Shylock: "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, 



66 HEART OF MAN 

organs, dimensions, senses, appetites, passions? fed with 
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to 
the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed 
and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Chris- 
tian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle 
us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and 
if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Rank and race 
are accidents; the essential thing is that the type be 
highly human, let the means of giving it this intensity 
and richness be what they may. 

It is true that the type may seem defective in the 
point that it is at best but a fragment of humanity, an 
abstraction or a combination of abstracted qualities. 
There was never such an athlete as our Greek sculptor's, 
never a pagan god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal 
to Homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, 
so terrible to his foe, so loving to his friend. And yet 
is it not thus that life is known to us actually? does not 
this typical rendering of character fall in with the natural 
habit of life? What man, what friend, is known to us 
except by fragments of his spirit? Only one life, our 
own, is known to us as a continuous existence. Just 
as when we see an orange, we supply the further side 
and think of it as round, so with men we supply from 
ourselves the unseen side that makes the man com- 
pletely and continuously human. Moreover, it is a mat- 
ter of common experience that men, we ourselves, may 
live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at one 
moment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that 
activity both in consciousness and energy; for that 
moment we are only living so; now, if a character were 
shown to us only in the moments in which he was living 
so, at his best and in his characteristic state as the 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 67 

soldier, the priest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction 
of literature would not differ from the actuality of our 
experience. In this selfsame way we habitually build 
for ourselves ideal characters out of dead and living 
men, by dwelling on that part of their career which we 
most admire or love as showing their characteristic 
selves. Napoleon is the conqueror, St. Francis the priest, 
Washington the great citizen, only by this method. They 
are not thereby de-humanized; neither do the ideal types 
of imagination fail of humanization because they are 
thus fragmentary, but consistently, presented. 

The type must make this human appeal under all cir- 
cumstances. Its whole meaning and virtue lie in what 
it contains of our common humanity, in the clearness 
and brilliancy with which it interprets the man in us, 
in the force with which it identifies us with human nature. 
If it is separated from us by a too high royalty or a too 
base villainy, it loses intelligibility, it forfeits sympathy, 
it becomes more and more an object of simple curiosity, 
and removes into the region of the unknown. Even if 
the type passes into the supernatural, into fairyland or 
the angelic or demoniac world, it must not leave humanity 
behind. These spheres are in fact fragments of humanity 
itself, projections of its sense of wonder, its goodness, 
and its evil, in extreme abstraction though concretely 
felt. Fairy, angel, and devil cease to be conceivable 
except as they are human in trait, however the condi- 
tions of their nature may be fancied; for we have no 
other materials to build with save those of our life on 
earth, though we may combine them in ways not justi- 
fied by reason. In so far as these worlds are in the 
limits of rational imagination, they are derived from 
humanity, partial interpretations of some of its moods, 



68 HEART OF MAN 

portions of itself; and the beings who inhabit them are 
impaired for the purposes of art in the degree to which 
their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of com- 
plete humanity. For this reason in dealing with such 
simple types, being natures all of one strain, it has been 
found best in practice to import into them individually 
some quality widely common to men in addition to that 
limited quality they possess by their conception. Some 
touch of weakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a 
devil, some unmerited misfortune in an Ariel, bring 
them home to our bosoms; just as the frailty of the hero, 
however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke. Thus 
these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, 
with the whole of life in ourselves. 

Types, then, whether simple or complex, whether ap- 
parently physical or purely spiritual, whether given frag- 
mentary or as wholes of personality, express human 
character in its essential traits. They may be narrow 
or broad generalizations; but if to know ourselves be 
our aim, those types, which show man his common and 
enduring nature, are the most valuable, and rank first 
in importance; in proportion as they are specialized, they 
are less widely interpretative; in proportion as they es- 
cape from time and place, race, culture, and religion, 
and present man eternal and universal in his primary 
actions, moods, and passions, they appeal to a greater 
number and with more permanence; they become im- 
mortal in becoming universal. To preserve this uni- 
versality is the essence of the type, and the degree of 
universality it reaches is its measure of value to men. 
It is immaterial whether it be simple as Ajax or com- 
plex as Hamlet, whether it be the work of imagination 
solely as in Hercules, or have a historical basis as in 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 69 

Agamemnon; its exemplary rendering of man in general 
is its substance and constitutes its ideality. 

Action, the second great branch of life, is generalized 
by plot. It lies, as has been said, in the region of ex- 
perience. Character, though it may be conceived as 
latent, can be presented only energetically as it finds 
outward expression. It cannot be shown in a vacuum. 
It embodies or reveals itself in an act; form and feature, 
as expressive of character, are the record of past acts. 
This act is the link that binds type to plot. By means 
of it character enters the external world, determining the 
course of events and being passively affected by them. 
Plot takes account of this interplay and sets forth its 
laws. It is, therefore, more deeply engaged with the 
environment, as type is more concerned with the man 
in himself. It is, initially, a thing of the outward as 
type is a thing of the inward world. How, then, does 
literature, through plot, reduce the environment in its 
human relations to organic form? 

The course of events, taken as a whole, is in part a 
process of nature independent of man, in part the prod- 
uct of his will. It is a continuous stream of phenomena 
in great multiplicity, and proceeding in a temporal se- 
quence. Science deals with that portion of the whole 
which is independent of man, and may be called natural 
events, and by discerning causal relations in them arrives 
at the conception of law as a principle of unchanging 
and necessary order in nature. Science seeks to reduce 
the multiplicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur 
to these simple formulas of law. Science does not begin 
in reality until facts end; facts, ten or ten thousand, are 
indifferent to her after the law which contains them is 
found, and are a burden to her until it is found. Litera- 



70 HEART OF MAN 

ture, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the 
same ways as science, by attending to causal relations, 
arrives at the conception of spiritual laws as a similarly 
permanent principle in the order of the soul. This 
causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which by defini- 
tion is a series of events causally related and conceived 
as a unit, technically called the action. Plot is thus 
analogous to an illustrative experiment in science; it is 
a concrete example of law — it is law operating. 

The course of events again, so far as they stand in 
direct connection with human life, may be thought of as 
the expression of the individual's own will, or of that 
of his environment. The will of the environment may 
be divided into three varieties, the will of nature, the 
will of other men, and the will of God. In each case 
it is will embodied in events. If these ideas be all 
merged in the conception of the world as a totality whose 
course is the unfolding of one Divine will operant through- 
out it and called Fate or Providence, then the individual 
will, through which, as through nature a 1 so, the Divine 
will works, is only its servant. Action so conceived, the 
march of events under some heavenly power working 
through the mass of human will which it overrules in 
conjunction with its own more comprehensive purposes, 
is epic action; in it characters are subordinate to the 
main progress of the action, they are only terms in the 
action; however free they may be apparently, considered 
by themselves, that freedom is within such limits as to 
allow entire certainty of result, its mutations are included 
in the calculation of the Divine will. The action of 
the "iEneid" is of this nature: a grand series of destined 
events worked out through human agency to fulfil the 
plan of the ruler of all things in heaven and earth. On 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 71 

the other hand, if the course of events be more narrowly 
attended to within the limits of the individual's own 
activity, as the expression primarily and significantly of 
his personal will, then the successive acts are subordinate 
to the character; they are terms of the character which 
is thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. Action, 
so conceived, is dramatic action. If in the course of 
events there arises a conflict between the will of the 
individual and that of his environment, whether nature, 
man, or God, then the seed of tragedy, specifically, is 
present; this conflict is the essential idea of tragedy. In 
all these varieties of action, the scene is the external 
world; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, 
the causal principle, obtaining in it. 

It is necessary, however, to refine upon this statement 
of the matter. The course of external events, in so far 
as it affects one person, whether as proceeding from or 
reacting upon him, reveals character, and has meaning 
as an interpretation of inward life. It is a series outward 
indeed, but parallel with the states of will, intellect, and 
emotion which make up the consciousness of the charac- 
ter; and it is interesting humanly only as a mirror of 
them. It is not the murderous blow, but the depraved 
will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; 
not the muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, 
but remorse working itself out, that hold our attention. 
Plot here manifests the laws of character outwardly; 
but the human reality lies within, and to be seen requires 
the illumination which only our own hearts can give. 
All action is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The 
constancy, the intimacy, the profundity with which 
Shakespeare felt this, from the earliest syllables of his 
art, and the frequency with which he dwells upon it, 
mark a characteristic of genius. Says Richard II. : 



72 HEART OF MAN 

" 'Tis very true, my grief lies all within; 
And these external manners of lament 
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief 
That swells in silence in the tortured soul; 
There lies the substance." 

So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of Athens, 
excusing all art: "The best in this kind are but shadows." 
So Hamlet; so Prospero. 

Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phe- 
nomena; so far as these are physical, their law is one of 
the physical world, and interests us no more than other 
physical laws; so far as they belong in the inward world 
of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has human 
interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The 
external fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the 
internal fact is of the unseen world, and is beheld only in 
the light which is within our own bosoms — it is spiritu- 
ally discerned. On the stage plainly this is the case. 
So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they 
are merely spectacular; so far as they express desires 
and energies, they are dramatic, and these we do not see 
but feel according as our experience permits us so to 
comprehend them. We contemplate a world of emotion 
there in connection with the active energy of the will, a 
world of character in operation in man; we feed it from 
our life, interpret it therefrom, build it up in ourselves, 
suffering the illusion till absorbed in what is arising in 
our consciousness under the actor's genius we become 
ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he who 
makes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama 
from the scene that it goes on in our own bosoms; there 
is the stage without any illusion whatsoever; the play 
is vital for the moment in ourselves. 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 73 

And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is 
only through our own hearts that we look into the hearts 
of others. We interpret the external signs of sense in 
terms of personality and experience known only within 
us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to 
our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, 
something never seen any more than our own personality. 
Thus our knowledge of them is not only fragmentary, 
as has been said; it is imaginative even within its limits. 
It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we 
live in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit 
like unto ourselves abides — the human soul, though 
never seen face to face. To enter this substantial world 
behind the phenomena of human life as sensibly shown 
in imagination, to know the invisible things of personality 
and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order, 
is the main end of ideal art. Though in plot the out- 
ward order is brought into the fullest prominence, and 
may seem to occupy the field, yet it is significantly only 
the shadow of that order within. 

In thus presenting plot as the means by which the 
history of a single soul is externalized, one important 
element has been excluded from consideration. The 
causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a double 
unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in 
action as a state of mind and a state of external fact. 
Under one aspect, so much of the action as is included 
in any single life and is there a linked sequence of mental 
states, has its unity in the personality of that individual. 
Under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forth 
the relations of all the characters involved, of their 
several courses of experience as elements in the working 
out of the joint result, has its unity in the constitution 



74 HEART OF MAN 

of the universe — the impersonal order, that structure 
of being itself, which is independent of man's will, which 
is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and 
which he must accept without appeal. This necessity, 
to give it the best name, to which man is exposed without 
and subjected within, is in its broadest conception the 
power that increases life, and all things are under its 
sway. Its sphere is above man's will; he knows it as 
immutable law in himself as it is in nature; it is the 
highest object of his thoughts. Its workings are sub- 
mitted to his observation and experiment as a part of 
the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individ- 
uals, social groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the 
action of the lyric, the drama, and the epic as the law 
of life. In its sphere is the higher unity of plot by 
virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main 
action. Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermedi- 
ary between man and his environment, but deeply en- 
gaged in the latter, and not to be freed from it even by 
a purely spiritualistic philosophy; for though we say 
that, as under one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen 
world of the soul's life, so under the other it shadows 
forth the invisible will of God, we do not escape from 
the outward world. Sense is still the medium by which 
only man knows his brother man and God also as through 
a glass darkly — 

"The painted veil which those who live call life." 

It separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense element 
in which the pure soul is submerged. 

It is necessary only to summarize the characteristics 
of plot which are merely parallel to those of type already 
illustrated. Plot may be simple or complex; it may be 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 75 

more or less involved in physical conditions in propor- 
tion as it lays stress on its machinery or its psychology; 
it must be important, as the type must be high, but 
important by virtue of its essential human meaning and 
not of its accidents; it is a fragment of destiny only, 
but in this falls in with the way life in others is known 
to us; if it passes into the superhuman world, it must 
retain human significance and be brought back to man's 
life by devices similar to those used in the type for the 
same purpose; it rises in value in proportion to the uni- 
versality it contains, and gains depth and permanence as 
it is interpretative of common human fate at all times 
and among all men; it may be purely imaginary or 
founded on actual incidents; and its exemplary interpre- 
tation of man's life is its substance, and constitutes its 
ideality. 

In the discussion of type and plot, the concrete nature 
of the world of art, which was originally stated to be 
the characteristic work of the creative reason, or imagina- 
tion acting in conformity with truth, has been assumed; 
but no reason has been given for it, because it seemed 
best to develop first with some fullness the nature of that 
inward order which is thus projected in the forms of 
art. It belongs to the frailty of man that he seizes with 
difficulty and holds with feebleness the pure ideas of the 
intellect, the more in proportion as they are removed 
from sense; and he seeks to support himself against this 
weakness by framing sensible representations of the ab- 
stract in which the mind can rest. Thus in all lands 
and among savage tribes, as well as in the most civilized 
nations, symbols have been used immemorially. The 
flag of a nation has all its meaning because it is taken 
as a physical token of national honor, almost of national 



76 HEART OF MAN 

life itself. The Moslem crescent, the Christian cross, 
have only a similar significance, a bringing near to the 
eye of what exists in reality only for the mind and heart. 
A symbol, however, is an arbitrary fiction, and stands to 
the idea as a metaphor does to the thing itself. In litera- 
ture the parable of the mustard seed to which the king- 
dom of heaven was likened, exemplifies symbolical or 
metaphorical method; but the tale of the court of Arthur's 
knights, ideal method; between them, and sharing some- 
thing of both, lies allegorical method. Idolatry is the 
religion of symbolism, for the image is not the god; 
Christianity is the religion of idealism, for Christ is God 
incarnate. Idealism presents the reality itself, the uni- 
versal truth made manifest in the concrete type, and 
there present and embodied in its characteristics as they 
are, not merely arbitrarily by a fiction of thought, sym- 
bolically or allegorically. 

The way in which type concretes truth is sufficiently 
plain; but it may be useful, with respect to plot, to draw 
out more in detail the analogy which has been said to 
exist between it and an illustrative scientific experiment. 
If scientific law is declared experimentally, the course of 
nature is modified by intent; certain conditions are se- 
cured, certain others eliminated; a selected train of 
phenomena is then set in motion to the end that the 
law may be illustrated, and nothing else. In a perfect 
experiment the law is in full operation. In plot there is 
a like selection of persons, situations, and incidents so 
arranged as to disclose the working of that order which 
obtains in man's life. The law may be simple and shown 
by means of few persons and incidents in a brief way, 
as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many 
characters in an abundance of action over a wide scene 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 77 

as in Shakespeare; in either case equally there is a 
selection from the whole mass of man's life of what shall 
illustrate the causal union in its order and show it in 
action. The process in the epic or prose narrative is 
the same. The common method of all is to present the 
universal law in a particular instance made for the pur- 
pose. 

In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers 
no transformation; it remains what it was, general truth, 
the very essence of type and plot being, as has been said, 
to preserve this universality in the particular instance. 
There is a sense in which this general truth is more real, 
as Plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which the 
phenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, 
for phenomena come and go, but the law remains; a 
sense in which the order in man's breast is more real than 
he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of ideas, the 
mold of law, are permanent, but their expression in us 
transitory. It is this higher realism, as it was anciently 
called, that the mind strives for in idealism — this organic 
form of life, the object of all rational knowledge. Types, 
under their concrete disguise, are thus only a part 
of the general notions of the mind found in every 
branch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, 
similarly, are only a part of the general laws of the 
ordered world; literature in using them, and specializing 
them in concrete form by which alone they differ in 
appearance from like notions and laws elsewhere, merely 
avails itself of that condensing faculty of the mind which 
most economizes mental effort and loads conceptions with 
knowledge. In the type it is not personal, but human 
character that interests the mind; in plot, it is not 
personal, but human fate. 



78 HEART OF MAN 

While it is true that the object of ideal method is 
to reach universals, and reembody them in particular 
instances, this reasoning action is often obscurely felt 
by the imagination in its creative process. The very 
fact that its operation is through the concrete complicates 
the process. The mind of genius working out its will 
does not usually start with a logical attempt consciously; 
it does not arrive at truth in the abstract and then reduce 
it to concrete illustration in any systematic way; it does 
not select the law and then shape the plot. The poet 
is rather directly interested in certain characters and 
events that appeal to him; his sympathies are aroused, 
and he proceeds to show forth, to interpret, to create; 
and in proportion as the characters he sets in motion 
and the circumstances in which they are placed have 
molding force, they will develop traits and express them- 
selves in influences that he did not foresee. This is a 
matter of familiar knowledge to authors, who frequently 
discover in the trend of the imaginary tale a will of its 
own, which has its unforeseen way. The drama or story, 
once set in motion, tends to tell itself, just as life tends 
to develop in the world. The vitality of the clay it 
works in, is one of the curious experiences of genius, and 
occasions that mood of mystery in relation to their crea- 
tures frequently observed in great writers. In fact, this 
mode of working in the concrete, which is characteristic 
of the creative imagination, gives to its activity an in- 
ductive and experimental character, not to be confounded 
with the demonstrative act of the intellect which states 
truth after knowing it, and not in the moment of its 
discovery. In literature this moment of discovery is 
what makes that flash which is sometimes called intuition, 
and is one of the great charms of genius. 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 79 

The concrete nature of ideal art, to touch conveniently 
here upon a related though minor topic, is also the reason 
that it expresses more than its creator is aware of. In 
imaging life he includes more reality than he attends to; 
but if his representation has been made with truth, others 
may perceive phases of reality that he neglected. It is 
the mark of genius, as has hitherto appeared, to grasp 
life, not fragmentarily, but in the whole. So, in a scien- 
tific experiment, intended to illustrate one particular 
form of energy, a spectator versed in another science 
may detect some truth belonging in his own field. This 
richer significance of great works is especially found 
where the union of the general and the particular is 
strong; where the fusion is complete, as in Hamlet. In 
a sense he is more real than living men, and we can 
analyze his nature, have doubts about his motives, judge 
differently of his character, and value his temperament 
more or less as one might with a friend. The more 
imaginative a character is, in the sense that his person- 
ality and experience are given in the whole so that one 
feels the bottom of reality there, the more significance 
it has. Thus in the world of art discoveries beyond the 
intention of the writer may be made as in the actual 
world ; so much of reality does it contain. 

Will it be said that, in making primary the universal 
contents and spiritual significance of type and plot, I 
have made literature didactic, as if the word should stop 
my mouth? If it is meant by this that I maintain that 
literature conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, 
since only thus can it interest the mind which has its 
whole life in the pursuit and its whole joy in the possession 
of truth. But if it be meant that abstract or moral 
instruction has been made the business of literature, the 



So HEART OF MAN 

charge may be met with a disclaimer, as should be evi- 
dent, first, from the emphasis placed on its concrete deal- 
ing with persons and actions. On the contrary, literature 
fails in art precisely in proportion as it becomes expressly 
such a teacher. Secondly, the life which literature or- 
ganizes, the whole of human nature in its relation to the 
world, is many-sided; and imaginative genius, the crea- 
tive reason, grasps it in its totality. The moral aspect 
is but one among many that life wears. If ethics are 
implicit in the mass of life, so also are beauty and passion, 
pathos, humor, and terror; and in literature any one 
of these may be the prominent phase at the moment, for 
literature gives out not only practical moral wisdom, but 
all the reality of life. Literature is didactic in the re- 
proachful sense of the word only in proportion as type 
and plot are distinctly separated from the truth they 
embody, and ceases to be so in proportion as these are 
blended and unified. The fable is one of the most 
ancient forms of such didactic literature; in it a story 
is told to enforce a lesson, and animals are made the 
characters, in consequence of which it has the touch 
of humor inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing 
at being men; but the very fact that the moral is of men 
and the tale is of beasts involves a separation of the 
truth from its concrete embodiment, and besides the 
moral is stated by itself. In the Oriental apologue an 
advance is made. The parables of our Lord, in par- 
ticular, are admirable examples of its method. The char- 
acters are few, the situations common, the action simple, 
and the moral truth or lesson enforced is so completely 
clothed in the tale that it needs no explanation; at the 
same time, the mind is aware of the teacher. In the 
higher forms of literature, however, the fusion of ethics 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 81 

with life may be complete. Here the poet works so 
subtly that the mind is not aware of the illumination of 
this light which comes without the violence of the 
preacher, until after the fact; and, indeed, the effect 
is wrought more through the sympathies than the reason. 
In such a case literature, though it conveys moral with 
other kinds of truth, is not open to the charge of didac- 
ticism, which is valid only when teaching is explicit and 
abstract. The educative power of literature, however, 
is not diminished because in its art it dispenses with 
the didactic method, which by its very definiteness is 
inelastic and narrow; in fact, the more imaginative a 
character is, the more fruitful it may be even in moral 
truth; it may teach, as has been said, what the poet never 
dreamed his work contained. 

If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, the subject- 
matter of literature is life in the forms of personality and 
experience, and the particular facts with respect to these 
are generalized by means of type and plot in concrete 
form, and so are set forth as phases of an ordered world 
for the intelligence, to the end that man may know him- 
self in the same way as he knows nature in its living 
system — if this be so, what standing have those who 
would restrict literature to the actual in life? who would 
replace ideal types of manhood by the men of the time, 
and the ordered drama of the stage by the medley of 
life? They deny art, which is the instrument of the 
creative reason, to literature; for as soon as art, which 
is the process of creating a rational world, begins, the 
necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole ques- 
tion of values, facts being no longer equal among them- 
selves on the score of actuality, nor in fitness for the 
work in hand. The trivial, the accidental, the unmeaning, 



82 HEART OF MAN 

are rejected, and there will be no stopping short of the 
end; for art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ 
no other than the method of all reason, wherefore ideal- 
ism is to it what abstraction is to logic and induction to 
natural science — the breath of its rational being. Those 
who hold to realism in its extreme form, as a representa- 
tion of the actual only, behave as if one should say to 
the philosopher — leave this formulation of general 
notions and be content with sensible objects; or to the 
scientist — experiment no more, but observe the course 
of nature as it may chance to arise, and describe it 
in its succession. They bid us be all eye, no mind; all 
sense, no thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, 
no organization, no fabric of the reason. But there are 
no such realists; though pure realism has its place, as 
will hereafter be shown, it is usually found mixed with 
ideal method ; and as commonly employed the word desig- 
nates the preference merely for types and plots of much 
detail, of narrow application, of little meaning, in oppo- 
sition to the highly generalized and significant types and 
plots usually associated with the term idealism. In what 
way such realism has its place will also appear at a later 
stage. Here it is necessary to say no more than that in 
proportion as realism uses the ideal method only at the 
lowest, it narrows its appeal, weakens its power, and takes 
from literature her highest distinction by virtue of which 
she grasps the whole of character and fate in her crea- 
tion and informs man of the secrets of his human heart, 
the course of his effort and aspiration. 

I am aware that I have not proceeded so far without 
starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, 
what shall I say when it is alleged that there is no order 
such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 83 

insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too 
various in different races and ages, to be made the subject 
of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? Were 
this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to 
retain our illusion: for the mind delights in order, and 
will invent it. The mind is perplexed and disturbed 
until it finds this order ; and in the progressive integration 
of its experience into an ordered world lies its work. Art 
gives pleasure to the intellect, because in its structure 
whatever is superfluous and extrinsic has been eliminated, 
so that the mind contemplates an artistic work as a unity 
of relations bound each to each which it fully compre- 
hends. Such works, we say, have form, which is just 
this interdependence of parts wholly understood which 
appeals to the intellect, and satisfies it: they would please 
the mind, though the order they embody were purely 
imaginary, just as science would delight it, were the 
order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thus 
still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; 
man would delight to dream his dream. But it is not 
necessary to take this lower line of argument. 

It does not appear to me to be open to question that 
there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtain- 
ing in it as permanent and universal as in the material 
world. The soul of man has a common being in all. 
There could be no science of logic, psychology, or meta- 
physics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the 
identity of mind in all, nor any science of ethics on the 
hypothesis of any variation as to the identity of the 
will in all, nor any ground of expression even, of com- 
munication between man and man, on the hypothesis of 
any radical difference in the experience and faculties to 
which all expression appeals for its intelligibility; neither 



84 HEART OF MAN 

could there be any system of life in social groups, or 
plan for education, unless such a common basis is ac- 
cepted. The postulate of a common human nature is 
analogous to that of the unity of matter in science; it 
finds its complete expression in the doctrine of the 
brotherhood of man, for if race be fundamentally distin- 
guished from race as was once thought, it is only as 
element is distinguished from element in the old chemis- 
try. So, too, the postulate of an order obtaining in the 
soul, universal and necessary, independent of man's voli- 
tion, analogous in all respects to the order of nature, is 
parallel with that of the constancy of physical law. A 
rational life expects this order. The first knowledge of 
it comes to us, as that of natural law, by experience; in 
the social world — the relations of men to one another — 
and in the more important region of our own nature we 
learn the issue of certain courses of action as well as in 
the external world; in our own lives and in our dealings 
with others we come to a knowledge of, and a conformity 
to, the conditions under which we live, the laws operant in 
our being, as well as those of the physical world. Litera- 
ture assumes this order; in ^Eschylus, Cervantes, or 
Shakespeare, it is this that gives their work interest. 
Apart from natural science, the whole authority of the 
past in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests upon the 
permanence of this order, and its capacity to be known 
by man; that virtue makes men noble and vice renders 
them base, is a statement without meaning unless this 
order is continuous through ages; all principles of action, 
all schemes of culture, would be uncertain except on this 
foundation. 

So near is this order to us that it was known long 
before science came to any maturity. We have added, 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 85 

in truth, little to our knowledge of humanity since the 
Greeks; and if one wonders why ethics came before 
science, let him own at least that its priority shows that 
it is near and vital in life as science is not. We can do, 
it seems, without Kepler's laws, but not without the 
Decalogue. The race acquires first what is most needful 
for life; and man's heart was always with him, and his 
fate near. A second reason, it may be noted, for the 
later development of science is that our senses, as used 
by science, are more mental now, and the object itself 
is observable only by the intervention of the mind through 
the telescope or microscope or a hundred instruments 
into which, though physical, the mind enters. Our meth- 
ods, too, as well as our instruments, are things of the 
mind. It behooves us to remember in an age which 
science is commonly thought to have materialized, that 
more and more the mind enters into all results, and fills 
an ever larger place in life; and this should serve to make 
materialism seem more and more what it is — a savage 
conception. But recognizing the great place of mind in 
modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthly 
system, I am not disposed to discredit its earliest results 
in art and morals. I find in this penetration of the order 
of the world within us our most certain truth; and as 
our bodies exist only by virtue of sharing in the general 
order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have being only 
by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world. 
What, then, is this order? We do not merely con- 
template it: we are immersed in it, it is vital in us, it 
is that wherein we live and move and have our being, 
ever more and more in proportion as the soul's life out- 
values the body in our experience. It is necessary to 
expand our conception of it. Hitherto it has been pre- 



86 HEART OF MAN 

sented only as an order of truth appealing to the intellect: 
but the intellect is only one function of the soul, and 
thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. We know 
this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we 
know that certain choices end in enlarging and invigor- 
ating our faculties, and other choices in their enfeeble- 
ment and extinction; and the race adds, acting under the 
profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty 
to do the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up 
this doctrine in conscience. We know this order again 
under the aspect of joy, for joy attends some choices, 
and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of beauty, 
for certain choices result in beauty and others in deform- 
ity. What I maintain is that this order exists under 
four aspects, and may be learned in any of them — as 
an order of truth in the reason, as an order of virtue in 
the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order 
of beauty in the senses. It is the same order, the same 
body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force 
of our fourfold life — it has one unity in the intellect, 
the will, the emotions, the senses — is equal to the whole 
nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him on 
every side. A lover of beauty in whom conscience is 
feeble cannot wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold 
thinker err, though without a moral sense, if he accept 
truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure joy merely, 
if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere. 
The course of action that increases life may be selected 
because it is reasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; 
and therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the things 
that are beautiful, the things that are joyful, the things 
that are reasonable, the things that are right, and all else 
shall be added unto you. The binding force in this order 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 87 

is what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and 
emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal union which 
has hitherto been spoken of in the region of plot only; but 
it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature uni- 
versalizes experience in all these realms, in the provinces 
of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue 
and knowledge, and its method is the same in all. 

Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order in its prin- 
ciples, in those relations of its phenomena which consti- 
tute its laws, of the highest importance of anything of 
human concern? In harmony with these laws and only 
thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, 
righteous, wise, and beautiful. In ideal literature this 
knowledge is found, expressed, and handed down age 
after age — the knowledge of necessary and permanent 
relations in these great spheres which, taken together, 
exhaust the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is 
strong in proportion as he apprehends necessity in the 
sequence of will and act; his intellect is strong, his emo- 
tions, his sense of beauty, are strong in the same way 
in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each several 
field of experience. And conversely, the weakness of 
the intellect lies in a greater or less failure to realize 
relations of fact in their logic; and the other faculties, 
in proportion as they fail to realize such relations in 
their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity, 
in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature in- 
capable of effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal 
or diseased; but the state of error, whether more or less, 
whether voluntary or involuntary, whether curable or 
incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example from 
one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through 
ignorance of or distrust in or revolt from the supreme 



88 HEART OF MAN 

divine law seeks to maintain himself by his own power 
solitarily as if he might be a law unto himself; he ex- 
periences, without the intervention of any human judge, 
the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement 
and extinction through the decay and death of his nature, 
as a moral being, stage by stage; this is God's justice, 
visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to most more 
obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society, 
because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers 
not to accept arbitrary social law as the means by which 
necessarily the general good, including his own, is worked 
out, seeks to substitute for it his own intelligence, his 
cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives it, 
by an adaptation of means to ends on his account. This 
is why the imperfection of human law is sometimes a 
just excuse for social crime in those whom society does 
not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. But whether in God's 
world or in man's the mind of the criminal, disengaging 
itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever 
reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary 
relations of the world in which he lives in their normal 
operation, and has no effectual belief in them as unavoid- 
ably operant in his nature or over his fortunes. This 
was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that all 
sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any 
possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been 
illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In 
the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar 
aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, 
in organic relation to the whole of life. 

These several parts of our being are not independent 
of one another, but are in the closest alliance. They act 
conjointly and with one result in the single soul in which 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 89 

they find their unity as various energies of one personal 
power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise 
among them in their right operation, nor the error of one 
continue undetected by the others; that the base should 
be joyful or the wicked beautiful in reality, is impossible. 
In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the pride of 
life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of 
the inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment 
they may seem pleasurable, but in the backward reach 
of memory they take on pain; to assert eternity against 
the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as if all of 
life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labor 
of the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all 
together. To represent a villain as attractive is an error 
of art, which thus misrepresents the harmony of our 
nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton, may seem to be 
a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton's imagi- 
nation. "The infernal Serpent" is the first name the 
poet gives him; and though sublime imagery of gloom 
and terror is employed to depict his diminished brightness 
and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly takes pains to 
degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is sur- 
prised at the ear of Eve "squat like a toad"; and when 
he springs up in his own form there, as the "grisly king," 
he mourns his beauty lost; neither is his resolute courage 
long admirable. To me, at least, so far from having 
any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend 
sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great 
creations of art it is necessary that this consistency of 
beauty, virtue, reason, and joy should be preserved. 

It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward 
world, so constituted, is less realized than in the physical 
world; but even in the latter the wide conviction of its 






90 HEART OF MAN 

supremacy is a recent thing, and in some parts of nature 
it is still lightly felt, especially in those which touch 
the brain most nearly, while under the stress of excep- 
tional calamity or strong desire or traditional religious 
beliefs it often breaks down. But if the order of the 
material universe seems now a more settled thing than 
the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was reversed; 
God was known and nature miraculous. It must be re- 
membered, too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that 
we are born bodily into the physical world and are forced 
to live under its law; but life in the spiritual world is 
more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its degree; 
its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our develop- 
ment and growth, on our living habitually and intelli- 
gently in our higher nature, the laws of which as com- 
municated to us by other minds are in part prophecies 
of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is the touch- 
stone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both 
worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long 
delayed; it is power of mind that makes wide generaliza- 
tions in both; and the conception of spiritual law is the 
most refined as perhaps it is the most daring of human 
thoughts. 

The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so 
as to embrace these other aspects, in addition to that of 
rational knowledge which has thus far been exclusively 
dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature in the 
regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though 
generalization remains its intellectual method, it does 
not make its direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough 
to show that the creative reason in its intellectual process 
employs that common method which is the parent of all 
true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 91 

is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among 
man's faculties; the story were then left half told, and 
the better part yet to come. To enlighten the mind is 
a great function; but in the mass of mankind there are 
few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on the 
unworldly side of life, or interested in them. Idealism does 
not confine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectu- 
ality. It has a second and greater office, which is to 
charm the soul. So characteristic of it is this power, so 
eminent and shining, that thence only springs the sweet 
and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself. 
Idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so 
much clothe wisdom as reveal her beauty; so the Greek 
sculptor discloses the living form by the plastic folds. 
Truth made virtue is her work of power, and she imposes 
upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of 
that sight — 

"Virtue in her shape how lovely," 

which since it first abashed the devil in Paradise makes 
wrong-doers aware of their deformity, and yet has such 
subtle and penetrating might, such fascination for all 
finer spirits, that they have ever believed with their 
master, Plato, that should truth show her countenance 
unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship 
and follow her. 

The images of Plato — those images in which alone 
he could adequately body forth his intuitions of eternity 
— present the twofold attitude of our nature, in mind 
and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness; and 
they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the 
more fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness 
of their mutual life in the soul. Under the aspect of 



92 HEART OF MAN 

truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal to that which 
the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall; 
under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as 
that of the passionate lover. As truth, again — taking 
up in his earliest days what seems the primitive im- 
pulse and first thought of man everywhere and at all 
times — under the image of the golden chain let down 
from the throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly 
origin of the ideal and its descent on earth by divine 
inspiration possessing the poet as its passive instrument; 
and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in the 
act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence 
of the soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more 
defined and rationalized conception of inspiration work- 
ing normally instead of by the special act and favor of 
God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm 
evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of 
the white and black horses mastering them to the goal 
of love. In these various ways the first idealist thought 
out these distinctions of truth and beauty as having a 
real community, though a divided life in the mind and 
heart; and, as he developed — and this is the significant 
matter — the poet in him controlling his speech told ever 
more eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws 
the soul unto itself, for to the poet beauty is nearer than 
truth. It is the persuasion with which he sets forth 
this charm, rather than his speculation, which has fas- 
tened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first 
to discern in truth and beauty equal powers of one divine 
being, and thus to effect the most important reconcilia- 
tion ever made in human nature. 

So, too, from the other great source of the race's 
wisdom, we are told in the Scriptures that though we be 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 93 

fallen men, yet is it left to us to lift our eyes to the 
beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of that 
outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates 
to the heart of man. Then we are moved, indeed, and 
incited to seek virtue with true desire. Prophet and 
psalmist are here at one with the poet and the philosopher 
in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew 
genius in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet at- 
tractive grace, the noble beauty of the present life incar- 
nated in his acts and words, the divine reality on earth 
and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed, that has 
drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived 
under the Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of 
spiritual beauty which has since shone in its purity on 
men's gaze. It is this loveliness which needs only to 
be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; 
and, however we may slight them in practice, the habit 
of emotion more than the habit of mind enters into and 
fixes inward character. More men are saved by the 
heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to 
excellence by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into 
virtue on the ground of gain. Some there are among 
men so colorless in blood that they embrace the right on 
the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to 
possess only an earthly virtue ; some, beholding the order 
of the world, desire to put themselves in tune with nature 
and the soul's law, and these are of a better sort; but 
most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured, find 
virtue not in profit nor in the necessity of conforming to 
implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her 
face as it first comes to them with ripening years in the 
sweet and noble nature of those they grow to love and 
honor among the living and the dead. For this is Achilles 



94 HEART OF MAN 

made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely 
it were little to see the story of Pelops* line if the 
emotions were not awakened, not merely for a few 
moments of intense action of their own play, but to form 
the soul. The emotional glow of the creative imagina- 
tion has been once mentioned in the point that it is often 
more absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the 
intellectual significance of its work; here, correspond- 
ingly, it is by the heart to which it appeals rather than 
by the mind it illumines that it takes hold of youth. 

What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal 
which surpasses so much in intimacy, pleasure, and power 
the appeal to the intellect? It is the keystone of the 
inward nature, that which binds all together in the arch 
of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement 
which calls it forth; and it responds with most energy 
to beauty. In the strictest sense beauty is a unity of 
relations of coexistence in colored space and appeals to 
the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot, 
it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in 
the sensuous order, and it shadows forth the spiritual 
order in man only in so far as a fair soul makes the 
body beautiful, as Spenser thought — the mood, the act, 
and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities 
of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It 
is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a 
phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the neces- 
sary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to 
plot — its cardinal idea — that the necessary harmony 
of parts, the chime of line and color, is to beauty; thus 
beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in 
the form and color of the universe as fate is in its tem- 
poral movement. And as plot has its characteristic unity 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 95 

in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's 
event, so beauty has its characteristic unity in the same 
order shown in the visible creation of space. It is true 
that all phenomena are perceived by the mind, and are 
conditioned, as is said, by human modes of perception; 
but within the limits of the relativity of all our knowledge, 
beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and 
though the structure of the human eye arranges the 
harmonies of line and color, it is no more than as the 
form of human thought arranges cause and effect and 
other primary relations in things; beauty does not in 
becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing 
external, independent of our will, and imposed on us 
from without. It is this outward reality, the harmony 
of sense, that sculpture and painting add in their types 
to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality, 
and often in them this physical element is predominant; 
and in the purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. 
In landscape, which is in the realm of beauty, personality 
altogether disappears, unless, indeed, nature be inter- 
preted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its 
Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man 
may cast upon nature as his shadow is not expressive 
of any true personality there abiding, but enters into 
the scene as the face of Narcissus into the brook. The 
pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only part of 
its general delight in order of any sort; and visible 
artistic form as abstracted from the world of space is 
merely a species of organic form and is included in it. 

The eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensu- 
ous field, the idea of beauty as a unity of space-relations 
giving pleasure is so simple, and the experience is so 
usual, that the word has been carried over to the life 



96 HEART OF MAN 

of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomena 
arise; differing only in the fact that they exist in another 
sense. Thus in the dominion of the ear especially, we 
speak commonly of the beauty of music; but the life of 
the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, is composed 
of too simple elements to allow of such combination as 
would constitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, 
though in the blind and deaf the possibility of high 
and intelligible complexity in these senses is proved. 
Similarly, the term is carried over to the invisible and 
inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak 
of the beauty of Sidney's act, of Romeo's nature, and, 
in the abstract, of the beauty of holiness, and, in a still 
more remote sphere, of the beauty of a demonstration 
or a hypothesis ; by this usage we do not so much describe 
the thing as convey the charm of the thing. This charm 
is more intimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature 
who rejoice in visible loveliness or in heard melodies; but 
to the spiritually minded it may be as close and pene- 
trating in the presence of what is to them dearer than 
life and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. It 
is this charm, whether flowing from the outward sem- 
blance or shining from the unseen light, that wins the 
heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be one with 
this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit 
and the body of things, to go toward it in love, to identify 
one's being with it as the order of life, mortal and im- 
mortal; last the will quickens, and its effort to make this 
order prevail in us and possess us is virtue. The act 
through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of 
the soul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally 
wills. Emotion is the intermediary between the divine 
order and the human will; it responds to the beauty of 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 97 

the one and directs the choice of the other, and is felt 
in either function as love controlling life in the new 
births of the spirit. 

The emotion, to return to the world of art, which is 
felt in the presence of imaginary things is actual in us; 
but the attempt is made to fix upon it a special character 
differentiating it from the emotion felt in the presence 
of reality. One principle of difference is sought in the 
point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, 
emotion entails no action; it has no outlet, and is with- 
out practical consequences; the will is paralyzed by the 
fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of events, 
and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or 
painting by the impossibility of possession. The world 
of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, 
a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the 
incompleteness that beset all action. It is true that the 
imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, 
and that the will does not act in respect to that world; 
but does this imply any radical difference in the emotion, 
or does it draw after it the consequence that the will does 
not act at all? Checked emotion, emotion dying in its own 
world, is common in life; and so, too, is contemplation 
as a mode of approach to beauty, as in landscape, or 
even in human figures where there is no thought of any 
other possession than the presence of beauty before the 
eye and soul: escape, too, into a sphere of impersonality, 
in the love of nature or the spectacle of life, is a common 
refuge. Art does not give us new faculties, generate un- 
known habits, or in any way change our nature; it 
presents to us a new world only, toward which our mental 
behavior is the same as in the rest of life. Why, then, 
should emotion, the most powerful element in life, be 



gS HEART OF MAN 

thus far appeared as a life in purer energy and higher 
regarded as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has 
intensity of being than life itself? 

The distinction between emotion depicted and that felt 
in response must be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for 
both sorts are present at the same time. In literature 
emotion may be set forth as a phase of the character 
or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of 
high feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in 
a drama; it may be shown in the pure type of some one 
passion as in Romeo, or in the various moods of a rich 
nature as in Hamlet; but, whether it be predominant 
or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same 
way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. 
What happens when literature gives us, for instance, ex- 
amples of moral experience? It informs the mind of the 
normal course of certain lines of action, of the inevitable 
issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect 
to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at 
once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we 
are prepared to act. So, when literature presents ex- 
amples of emotional experience, it informs us of the 
nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its 
value in character, its influence on action, the modes of 
its expression; it breeds habits of right thinking in re- 
spect to these, and is educative; and, just as in the pre- 
ceding case, though we do not act at once upon this 
knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to 
act. Concurrently with emotions thus objectively pre- 
sented there arises in us a similar series of emotions in 
the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves feel what is 
before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion 
as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in propor- 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 99 

tion as our own individuality asserts itself by revolt, a 
contrary series arises of hatred, indignation, or contempt, 
of pity for the character or of terror in the feeling that 
what has happened to one may happen to us in our 
humanity. We are taught in a more intimate and vital 
way than through ideas alone; the lesson has entered into 
our bosoms; we have lived the life. Literature is thus 
far more powerfully educative emotionally than intellec- 
tually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has 
bred in us habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has 
familiarized our hearts with love and anger, with com- 
passion and fear, with courage, with resolve, has exercised 
us in them upon their proper occasions and in their noble 
expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as it 
ought to be in showing us that world as it is in men 
with all its possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruc- 
tion. This is the service which literature performs in 
this field. Imagination shows us a scheme of emotion 
attending the scheme of events and presents it in its 
general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and com- 
plete expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its 
sphere. We go out from the sway of this imagined world, 
more sensitive to life, more accessible to emotion, more 
likely and more capable, when occasion arises, to feel 
rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In 
all literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether 
of action or emotion, is a preparation for life; but this 
intimate experience of emotion in connection with an 
imagined world is a more vital preparation, and enters 
more directly, easily, and effectually into men's bosoms. 

Two particular phases of this educative power should 
be specifically mentioned. The objective presentation of 
emotion in literature, as has been often observed, corrects 



ioo HEART OF MAN 

the perspective of our own lives, as does also the action 
which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in 
intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds 
to high type and important plot, and in a compass far 
greater than is normal in ordinary life, the portrayal leads 
us better to bear and more justly to estimate the petty 
trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our 
career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in 
general, and avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to 
our private fortune. And, secondly, the subjective emo- 
tion in ourselves is educative in the point that by this 
outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our ego- 
ism, and become one with man in general. This is an 
escape; but not such as has been previously spoken of, 
for it is not a retreat. There is no escape for us, except 
into the lives of others. In nature it is still our own 
face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are 
still aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable 
yearning of the thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, 
the sadness in all beauty, which is the measure of our 
separation therefrom, and is fundamental in the poetic 
temperament. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of 
— the pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as 
they unfold. But in passing into the lives of other men, 
in sharing their joys, in taking on ourselves the burden 
of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, we leave 
individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so 
we die to ourselves in order to live in lives not ours. 
In literature, sympathy and that imagination by which 
we enter into and comprehend other lives are most trained 
and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick. It 
begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one 
with our nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 101 

path of the spirit in all things. Moreover, emotion is 
in itself simple; it does not need generalization, it is the 
same in all. It is rather a means of universalizing the 
refinements of the intellect, the substantive idealities of 
imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary, primi- 
tive feeling which they call forth. Poetry, therefore, es- 
pecially deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary 
affections, the elementary passions of mankind; and, 
whatever be its intellectual contents of nature or human 
events, calls these emotions forth as the master-spirit of 
all our seeing. Emotion is more fundamental in us than 
knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it under- 
lies more deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and 
in most of us it rules, as it influences in all. It is natural, 
therefore, to find that its operation in art is of graver 
importance than that of the intellectual faculty so far 
as the broad power of art over men is concerned. 

Another special point arises from the fact that some 
emotions are painful, and the question is raised how in 
literature painful emotions become a pleasure. Aristotle's 
doctrine in respect to certain of these emotions, tragic 
pity and terror, is well known, though variously inter- 
preted. He regards such emotions as a discharge of 
energy, an exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of 
which their disturbing presence is less likely to recur in 
actual life; it is as if emotional energy accumulated, as 
vital force is stored up and requires to be loosed in 
bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity 
and terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms 
latently, are specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, 
does not differentiate emotion from the rest of our powers 
in all of which there is a similar pleasure in exercising, 
an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability of immediate 



102 HEART OF MAN 

recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. It is 
not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illu- 
sions of art, can become pleasurable in the common 
sense; what pleasure there is arises only in the climax and 
issue of the action, as in case of the drama when the 
restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, 
and wise occurs; in other words, in the presence of the 
final poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed ele- 
ments of life. But here we come upon darker and mys- 
terious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly 
touched. Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must 
present painful spectacles; and is saved to art only by 
its just ending. Comedy, which similarly deals with dis- 
cords, is endurable only while these remain painless. 
Both imply a defect in order, and neither would have 
any place in a perfect world, which would be without 
pity, fear, or humor, all of which proceed from incon- 
gruities in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy belong 
alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculous 
types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, 
ignorance, and ignominies of mankind; the refinement 
of both is a mark of progress in both art and civilization, 
and foretells their own extinction, unless indeed the prin- 
ciple of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe 
than we fondly hope; pathos and humor, which are the 
milder and the kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, 
must also cease, for both are equally near to tears. But 
before leaving this subject it is interesting to observe 
how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was 
little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature 
as here outlined — the plot replying to reason, the scene 
to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emotions, and 
poetic justice to the will, which thus finds its model and 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 103 

exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in all 
tragic art. 

This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its 
whole range commensurate with our being, and these the 
methods of its intellectual and emotional appeal, it re- 
mains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially 
its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built 
up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of 
the actual, as has been assumed hitherto in the state- 
ment that all art is concrete. But the concrete which 
art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life; it is 
more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the 
world of sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames 
therefrom a new particular, which does not exist in 
nature; it is, in fact, nature made perfect in an imagined 
instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or to the 
eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has 
been often and diversely analyzed; it may be that of 
recognition, or that of new knowledge satisfying our 
curiosity as if the original were present, or that 
of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of 
interest in seeing how his view differs from our 
own, or that of the illusion created for us; but all 
these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation is an 
exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize 
the artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its 
peculiar pleasure. It is that element which artistic imi- 
tation adds to actuality, the difference between its created 
concrete and the original out of which that was developed, 
which gives the special delight of art to the mind. It 
is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, 
the inevitability of the plot, — it is the pure and intelli- 
gible form disclosed in the phases and movements of 



104 HEART OF MAN 

life, disengaged and set apart for the contemplation of 
the mind, — it is the purging of the sensual eye, enabling 
it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through 
it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, 
the revelation accomplished by the mind for the senses. 
If the world of art were only a reduplication of life, it 
would give only the pleasures that have been mentioned; 
but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its 
supersensual element, the reason which has entered into 
it with ordering power. In the world thus created there 
will remain the imperfections which are due to the limita- 
tion of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and choice. 

It will be said at once that all these concrete repre- 
sentations necessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, 
and are inadequate, inferior in exactness, to scientific 
and philosophic knowledge; in a measure this is true, 
and would be important if the method of art were demon- 
strative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental 
and inductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual 
world in their processes, are at a disadvantage. The 
figures of the geometer, the quantities of the chemist, 
the measurements of the astronomer, are inexact approxi- 
mations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an 
embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions 
of mortality. Hence arises its human history, the nar- 
rative of its rise, climax, and decline in successive ages. 
The course of art is known; it has been run many times; 
it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensi- 
ble form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; 
it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being 
adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, 
it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, 
dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 105 

The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elab- 
oration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes 
a power, it ends in being a caprice ; and always as it goes 
on it loses sight of the general in its rendering, and 
dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this 
attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of 
the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no longer 
the great types of manhood, the important fates of life, 
the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in 
the foreground of thought, but the individual is more 
and more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in 
feeling. 

This tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, 
constitutes decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion 
of general ideas, from the search for novelty of subject 
and sensation, from the special phenomena of a decaying 
society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the 
fact of decline consists in the lessened scope of the 
matter and the increased importance of the form, both 
resulting in luxuriant detail. Ideas as they lose gener- 
ality gain in intensity, but in the history of art this 
has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three 
stages are clearly marked both in matter and manner, 
in ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; in England less 
clearly in Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Webster. How 
monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! 
yet more repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. 
In Greek sculpture, passing into convulsed and muscular 
forms or forms of relaxed voluptuousness, in Italian paint- 
ing, in the romantic poetry of this century with us, the 
same stages are manifest. Age parallels age. Tennyson 
in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the 
style; but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in 



106 HEART OF MAN 

matter, in universality, and the elemental in man. 
Browning in substance is Euripidean, being individualis- 
tic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading; clas- 
sicism had departed from him, and left not even the style 
behind. The great opposition lies in the subject of 
interest. Is it to know ourselves in others? Then art 
which is widely interpretative of the common nature of 
man results. Is it to know others as different from our- 
selves? Then art which is specially interpretative of 
abnormal individuals in extraordinary environments re- 
sults. This is the opposition between realism and ideal- 
ism, while both remain in the limits of art, as these terms 
are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tend to 
the concrete of narrow application, but with fullness of 
special trait or detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to 
the concrete of broad application, but without peculiarity. 
The trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the other, 
in the individual, are the extremes of realistic art, while 
idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that 
wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which 
are the goal of a nation's effort. Race-ideas, or general- 
izations of a compact and homogeneous people summing 
up their serious interpretations of life, their moral choices, 
their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort that seem 
to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; 
when these are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the 
Roman genius, great types of humanity on the impersonal, 
the national scale. As these historic generalizations dis- 
solve in national decay, art breaks up in individual por- 
trayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the 
Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of 
the homunculus ; and in general the literature of national- 
ity gives way to the unmeaning and transitory literature 






A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 107 

of a society interested in its vices, superstitions, and 
sensations. In each age some genius stands at the center 
of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary 
stars; such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakespeare. 
Few indeed are the races that present the spectacle of 
a double-sun in their history, as the Hebrews in Psalm 
and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And 
yet, all this enormous range of life and death, this flower- 
ing in centuries of the human spirit in its successive 
creations, reposes finally on the more or less general 
nature of the concretes used in its art, on their broad 
or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic signifi- 
cance. The difference between idealism and realism is 
not more than a question which to choose. At the further 
end and last remove, when all art has been resolved into 
a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, by its 
nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by 
a single being; but even then, if the mind be normal, 
if the phase be veritable, if the moment be that of uni- 
versal beauty which Faust bade be eternal, the artistic 
work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usually 
the eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of 
morbid sensation that are rendered; and impressionism 
becomes, as a term, the vanishing-point of realism into the 
moment of sense. 

The world of art, to reach its last limitation, through 
all this range is in each creation passed through the 
mind of the artist and presented necessarily under all 
the conditions of his personality. His nature is a term 
in the process, and the question of imperfection or of 
error, known as the personal equation, arises. Individ- 
ual differences of perceptive power in comprehend- 
ing what is seen, and of narrative skill, or in the 



io8 HEART OF MAN 

plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import 
this personal element into all artistic works, the more 
in proportion to the originality of the maker and the 
fullness of his self-expression. In rendering from the 
actual such error is unavoidable, and is practically ad- 
mitted by all who would rather see for themselves than 
take the account of a witness, and prefer the original to 
any copy of it, though they thereby only substitute their 
own error for that of the artist. This personal error, 
however, is easily corrected by the consensus of human 
nature. 

The differences in personality go far deeper than this 
common liability of humanity to mere mistakes in sight 
and in representation. The isolating force that creates 
a solitude round every man lies in his private experi- 
ence, and results from his original faculties and the special 
conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of at- 
tending to some things rather than others open to him, 
the choices he has made in the past by which his view 
of the world and his interest in it have been determined. 
Memory, the mother of the Muses, is supreme here; a 
man's memory, which is the treasury of his chosen delights 
in life, characterizes him, and differentiates his work 
from that of others, because he must draw on that store 
for his materials. Thus a man's character, or, what is 
more profound, his temperament, acting in conjunction 
with the memory it has built up for itself, is a controlling 
force in artistic work, and modifies it in the sense that 
it presents the universal truth only as it exists in his 
personality, in his apprehension of it and its meaning. 

Genius is this power of personality, and exists in pro- 
portion as the man differs from the average in ways that 
find significant expression. This difference may proceed 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 109 

along two lines. It may be aberration from normal 
human nature, due to circumstances or to inherent defect 
or to a thousand causes, but existing always in the form 
of an inward perversion approaching disease of our na- 
ture; such types of genius are pathological and may be 
neglected. It may, on the other hand, be development 
of normal human nature in high power, and it then exists 
in the form of inward energy, showing itself in great 
sensitiveness to outward things, in mental power of com- 
prehension, in creative force of recombination and ex- 
pression. Of genius of this last sort the leaders of the 
human spirit are made. The basis of it is still human 
faculty dealing with the universe — the same faculty, 
the same universe, that are common to mankind; but 
with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to 
men at large what they of themselves might never have 
arrived at, can advance knowledge and show forth goals 
of human hope, can in a word guide the race. The 
isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound, and 
intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. 
The solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in 
this fact of a common world and a common faculty for 
all, resulting in an experience intelligible to all, even if 
unshared by them. The humanity of genius constitutes 
its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it 
lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost 
may; it expects the advent of the race behind and below 
it, and shows there its signal and sounds there its call. 
Its escape from personality lies in its identifying itself 
with the common order in which all souls shall finally be 
merged and be at one. The limitations of genius are 
consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation 
of limits in the ordinary sense; its originality of insight, 



no HEART OF MAN 

interpretation, and expression broadens the human hori- 
zons and enriches the fields within them; it tells us what 
we may not have known or felt or guessed, but what we 
shall at last understand. Thus, as the theory of art is 
most fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most 
flexible in the doctrine of personality, through which 
that order is most variously set forth and illustrated. 
Imitation, so far from becoming a defective or false 
method because of personality, is really made catholic 
by it, and gains the variety and breadth that character- 
izes the artistic world as a whole. 

The element of self which thus enters into every artistic 
work has different degrees of importance. In objective 
art, it is clear that it enters valuably in proportion as 
the universe is seized by a mind of right reason, of pro- 
found penetration, of truthful imagination; and if the 
work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while 
it remains objective in contents, as in Virgil the mood 
pervades the poem so deeply as to be a main part of it, 
then the mood must be one of those felt or capable of 
being felt universally — the profound moods of the medi- 
tative spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple 
joy and sorrow in less serious works. In proportion as 
society develops, whether in historic states singly or in 
the progress of mankind, the direct expression of self 
for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes 
more personal or purely subjective. If the poet's private 
story be one of action, it is plain that it has interest 
only as if it were objectively rendered, from its being 
illustrative of life in general; so, too, if the felt emotion 
be given, this will have value from its being treated as 
typical; and, in so far as the intimate nature of the 
poet is variously given as a whole in his entire works, it 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY m 

has real importance, has its justification in art, only in 
so far as he himself is a high normal type of humanity. 
The truth of the matter is, in fact, only a detail of the 
general proposition that in art history has no value of its 
own as such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and 
his nature and career, like that of any character or event 
in history, have no artistic value beyond their universal 
significance. In such self-portraiture there may be some- 
times the depicting of a depraved nature, such as Villon; 
but such a type takes its place with other criminal types 
of the imagination, and belongs with them in another 
sphere. 

This element of self finds its intense expression in 
lyrical love-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of 
literature because of its elementariness and universality; 
but it is also found in other parts of the emotional field. 
In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the poet may 
take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the 
world of inanimate nature yields the most plastic mold. 
It is a marvelous victory of the spirit over matter when 
it takes the stars of heaven and the flowers of earth 
and makes them utter forth its speech, less as it seems 
in words of human language than in the pictured hiero- 
glyph and symphonic movement of natural things; for 
in such poetry it is not the vision of nature, however 
beautiful, that holds attention; it is the color, form, and 
music of things externalizing, visualizing the inward 
mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. Nature is emp- 
tied of her contents to become the pure inhabitancy 
of one human soul. The poet's method is that of life 
itself, which is first awakened by the beauty without to 
thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by 
that beauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with 



ii2 HEART OF MAN 

the objects before him through his joy in them, and enter- 
ing there makes nature translucent with his own spirit. 

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is the eminent ex- 
ample of such magical power. The three vast elements, 
earth, air, and water, are first brought into a union through 
their connection with the west wind; and, the wind still 
being the controlling center of imagination, the poet, 
drawing all this limitless and majestic imagery with him, 
by gradual and spontaneous approaches identifies himself 
at the climax of feeling with the object of his in- 
vocation — 

"Be thou me, impetuous one!" 

and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric 
burst of personality, in which, while the body of nature 
is retained, there is only a spiritual meaning. So Burns 
in some songs, and Keats in some odes, following the same 
method, make nature their own syllables, as of some 
cosmic language. This is the highest reach of the artist's 
power of conveying through the concrete image the soul 
in its pure emotional life; and in such poetry one feels that 
the whole material world seems lent to man to expand 
his nature and escape from the solitude in which he is 
born to that divine union to which he is destined. The 
evolution of this one moment of passion is lyric form, 
whose unity lies in personality exclusively, however it 
may seem to involve the external world which is its 
imagery — its body lifted from the dust, woven of light 
and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. And 
here, too, as elsewhere^ to whatever height the poet may 
rise, it must be one to which man can follow, to which, 
indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it only nature which 
thus suffers spiritualization through the stress of imagina- 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 113 

tion interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of 
beauty, but the imagery of action also may be similarly 
taken possession of, though this is rare in merely 
lyrical expression. 

The ideal world, then, to present in full summary these 
views, is thus built up, through personality in all its rich- 
ness, by a perfected imitation of life itself, and is set 
forth in universal unities of relation, causal or formal, 
to the intellect in its inward, to the sense of beauty in 
its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire 
of the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, 
and thence is born the will to conform one's self to this 
order. If, then, this order be conceived as known in 
its principles and in operation in living souls, as existing 
in its completeness on the simplest scale in an entire 
series of illustrative instances but without multiplicity — 
if it be conceived, that is, as the model of a world — that 
would be to know it as it exists to the mind of God; that 
would be to contemplate the world of ideas as Plato con- 
ceived it seen by the soul before birth. That is the 
beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal move- 
ment as a developing world on earth, that would be to 
know "the plot of God," as Poe called the universe. Art 
endeavors to bring that vision, that plot, however frag- 
mentarily, upon earth. It is a world of order clothing 
itself in beauty, with a charm to the soul — such is our 
nature — operative upon the will to live. It is pre- 
eminently a vision of beauty. It is true that this beauty 
which thus wins and moves us seems something added 
by the mind in its great creations rather than anything 
actual in life; for it is, in fact, heightened and refined 
from the best that man has seen in himself, and it par- 
takes more of hope than of memory. Here is that woven 



ii4 HEART OF MAN 

robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who 
live in horizons of the eye and hand. Yet as idealism 
was found on its mental side harmonious with reason 
in all knowledge, and on its emotional side harmonious 
with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting tempera- 
ment that belongs to it and most characterizes it falls in 
with the natural faith of mankind. Idealism in this 
sense, too, existed in life before it passed into literature. 
The youth idealizes the maiden he loves, his hero, and 
the ends of his life; and in age the old man idealizes 
his youth. Who does not remember some awakening 
moment when he first saw virtue and knew her for what 
she is? Sweet was it then to learn of some Jason of the 
golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some dying 
Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in 
this early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but 
who knows not that such enthusiasm which earliest exer- 
cised the young heart in noble feelings is the source 
of most of the good that abides in us as years go on? In 
such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, 
hardens and supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; 
for here is its palaestra. Who would blot these from his 
memory? Who choke these fountain-heads, remembering 
how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them? 
Such moments, too, have something singular in their 
nature, and almost immortal, that carries them echoing 
far on into life where they strike upon us in manhood at 
chosen moments when least expected; some of them are 
the real time in which we live. It was said of old that 
great men were creative in their souls, and left their works 
to be their race; these ideal heroes have immortal souls 
for their children, age after age. Shall we in our youth, 
then, in generous emulation idealize the great of old 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 115 

times, and honor them as our fair example of what we 
most would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize those 
we love — so natural is it to believe in the perfection of 
those we love — and even if the time for forgiveness 
comes, and we show them the mercy that our own frailty 
teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since 
love continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet 
to come, and is the tenderer because it comes with strug- 
gle? Whether in our acts or our emotions shall we 
give idealism this range, and deny it to literature which 
discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfec- 
tion and with greater beauty? There we find the purest 
types to raise and sustain us; to direct our choice, and 
reinforce us with that emotion, that passion, which most 
supports the will in its effort. There history itself is 
taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole 
past of human emotion and action contained and shown 
forth with convincing power. Nor is it only with the 
natural habit of mankind that idealism falls in, but with 
divine command. Were we not bid be perfect as our 
Father in heaven is perfect? And what is that image 
of the Christ, what is that world-ideal, the height of 
human thought, but the work of the creative reason — 
not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate 
in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in 
saint and sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all 
the vast range of the millions of the dead whose thoughts 
live embodied in that great tradition — the supreme and 
perfected pattern of mankind? 

Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all 
this? that men were never such as the heart believes 
them, nor ideal characters, able to breathe mortal air? 
by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves, 



n6 HEART OF MAN 

and end at last in cynicism or despair? Why, then, 
should we not boldly affirm that the falsehood is 
rather in us, in the defects by which we fail of perfection, 
in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in the 
ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory, 
inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as Plato 
thought, the only reality, the truth which outlasts us all? 
But this may seem a subtle evasion rather than a frank 
answer. Let us rather say that idealism is one of the 
necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, 
and assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; 
that the reality it owns is that of the rose in the bud, 
the oak in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist. I believe 
that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every 
man who is born into the world. We forecast the future 
in other parts of life; why should we not forecast our- 
selves? Would he not be thought foolish who should 
refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, because 
he does not already hold the wealth to be gained? The 
ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or 
moment can hold. To refuse it is as if a man should 
neglect his estate because he can take but a handful of 
it in his grasp. It is the law of our being to grow, and 
it is a necessity that we should have examples and patterns 
in advance of us, by which we can find our way. There 
is no falsehood in such anticipation; there is only 
a faith in truth instead of a possession of it. Will you 
limit us to one moment of time and place? will you say 
to the patriot that his country is a geographical term? 
and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, 
will you point him to human nature as it seems at the 
period, to corruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, 
and tell him that is our actual America? Will he not 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 117 

rather say that his America is a great past, a future 
whose beneficence no man can sum? Is there any false- 
hood in this ideal country that men have ever held 
precious? Did Pericles lie in his great oration, and 
Virgil in his noble poem, and Dante in his fervid Italian 
lines? And as there are ideals of country, so also of 
men, of the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the 
citizen, and beside each of us does there not go one who 
mourns over our fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, 
and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal self, who is 
our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth 
is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the 
idealizing temperament, shall we not reply that the 
quack does not discredit the art of medicine, nor the 
demagogue the art of politics, and no more does the fool 
in all his motley the art of literature. 

Must I, however, come back to my answer, and meet 
those who aver that however stimulating idealism is to 
the soul, yet it must be remembered that in the world 
at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal order, 
to poetic ethics, and that to set these forth as the suprem- 
acy of what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise 
expectations in youth never to be realized, to pervert 
practical standards, and in brief to make a false start 
that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent suffering 
of mind, and with material disadvantage? I must be 
frank: I own that I can perceive in Nature no moral 
order, that in her world there is no knowledge of us 
or of our ideals, and that in general her order often 
breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and 
pitiful; and I acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil 
in the social, and its invasion in the individual, life of 
man. But, again, were we so situated that there should 



n8 HEART OF MAN 

be no external divine order apparent to our minds, were 
justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted 
prayer, there would still remain in us that order whose 
workings are known within our own bosom, that law 
which compels us to be just and merciful in order to 
lead the life that we rcognize to be best, and the whole 
imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, 
condemns us, irrespective of what future attends us in 
the world. Ideal order as the mind knows it, the mind 
must strive to realize, or stand dishonored in its own 
forum. Within us, at least, it exists in hope and some- 
what in reality, and following it in our effort, though 
we come merely to a stoical idea of the just man on whom 
the heavens fall, we should yet be nobler than the power 
that made us souls betrayed. But there is no such differ- 
ence between the world as it is and the world as ideal 
art presents it. 

What, then, is the difference between art and nature? 
Art is nature regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new 
birth into what ought to be; an ordered and complete 
world. But this is the vision of art as the ultimate of 
good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpses 
have already appeared in the course of this argument, 
though in the background. In the intellectual sphere 
evil is as subject to general statement as is good, and 
there is in the strict sense an idealization of evil, a uni- 
versal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more 
partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the 
emotional sphere also there is the throb of evil, felt 
as diabolic energy and presented as the element in which 
these characters have their being. Even in the sphere 
of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly 
choose evil as his portion? So, too, as the method of 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY n 9 

idealism in the world of the good tends to erect man 
above himself, the same generalizing method in the world 
of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; 
the extremes of the process are the divine and the 
devilish; both transcend life, but are developed out of 
it. The difference between these two poles of ideality 
is that the order of one is an order of life, that of the 
other an order of death. Between these two is the 
special province of the human will. What literature, 
what all art, presents is not the ultimate of good or the 
ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into account the 
whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought 
to be in its evolution from what it is, and the laws of 
that progress. Hence tragedy on the one hand and 
comedy, or more broadly humor, on the other hand, have 
their great place in literature; for they are forms of 
the intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spirit- 
ual world of man's will. We may conceive of the world 
optimistically as a place in which all shall issue in good 
and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by alliance 
with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its 
voluntary and individual action may save or lose the 
soul at its choice. We may think of God as conserving 
all, or as permitting hell, which is death. We do not 
know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism, 
which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these 
two worlds known to us in tendency if not in conclusion 
— the world of salvation on the one hand, in proportion 
as the order of life is made vital in us, the world of 
damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order 
of death prevails in our will; but the main effort of 
idealism is to show us the war between the two, with an 
emphasis on the becoming of the reality of beauty, joy, 



120 HEART OF MAN 

reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity follows 
righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in 
worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right 
will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, 
may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal 
existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those 
ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile 
environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from 
ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms 
its pity and evil by setting them in contrast with what 
ought to be, by showing virtue militant not only against 
external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our 
mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our 
most undermining and intimate foes. Here is no false 
world, but just that world which is our theater of action, 
that confused struggle, represented in its intelligible ele- 
ments in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the 
universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed 
to us in the ways most profitable for our instruction, 
who are bound to seek to realize the good through all 
the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men. Ideal 
literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles 
of good and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging 
from disorder, of beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, 
emerging from the chaos of things that are, in selected and 
typical examples. 

It follows from this that what remains in the world 
of observation in personality or experience, whether good 
or evil, whether particular or general, not yet coordinated 
in rational knowledge as a whole, all for which no solu- 
tion is found, all that cannot be or has not been made 
intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the 
exact use of that term. This must be recorded by litera- 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 121 

ture, or admitted into it, as matter-of-fact which is to 
the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery therefore is 
the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the 
unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old resid- 
uum, this new material, is not yet capable of art. 
Hence, too, realism in this sense characterizes ages of 
expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new informa- 
tion which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research 
into the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life 
by showing us both primitive and historical humanity 
in its changeful phases of progress working out the beast; 
and this new interest has been reenforced by the attention 
paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, 
to the lower and baser forms of life in the masses under 
civilization, which has been a new revelation of persistent 
savagery in our midst. Here realism illustrates its 
service as a gatherer of knowledge which may hereafter 
be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for 
idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart 
from this incoming of facts, or of laws not yet 
harmonized in the whole body of law, for which we 
may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, 
there remains forever that residuum of which I spoke, 
which has resisted the intelligence of man, age after 
age, from the first throb of feeling, the first ray of 
thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited suffering, 
that impotent pain — the human debris of the social 
process — which is a challenge to the power of God, and a 
cry to the heart of man that broods over it in vain, 
yet cannot choose but hear. In this region the near 
affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is plain 
enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, 
the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies 



122 HEART OF MAN 

of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, 
eating into the being as well as controlling the fortune 
of their victims, is manifest; and what answer has ever 
been found to the interrogation they make? It is not 
merely that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but 
laws themselves are discernible, types even not of nar- 
row application, which have not been brought into any 
relation with what I named the divine order. Millions 
of men in thousands of years are included in this holo- 
caust of past time — eras of savagery, Assyrian civiliza- 
tions, Christian butcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the 
Turk yet alive. 

And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life 
rises into a heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? 
There is no place for realism here, where observation 
ceases and our only human outlook is by inference from 
principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us; 
yet what problems are we aware of? Must — to take 
the special problem of art — must the sensuous scheme 
of life persist, since of its warp and woof are woven all 
our possibilities of communication, all our capabilities 
of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. 
Must God be still thought of in the image of man, since 
only in terms of our humanity can we conceive even divine 
things, whether in forms of mortal pleasure as the 
Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual 
bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? 
These are rather philosophical problems. But in art, 
as at the realistic end of the scale, we admit the por- 
traiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the 
unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the 
idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial 
after human models, and feel it, even in Milton and in 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 123 

Dante, minimizing. The mysticism of the borderland 
at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. We 
do not know. But within the narrow range of the in- 
telligible and ordered world of art, which has been 
achieved by the creative reason of civilized man in his 
brief centuries and along the narrow path from Jerusalem 
and Athens to the western world, we do know that for 
the normal man born into its circle of light the order 
of life is within our reach, the order of death within reach 
of us. Shut within these limits of the victory of our 
intellect and the upreaching of our desires and the war- 
fare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the divine 
order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, 
that the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or 
from nature or from God — that the evil principle can- 
not prevail. It is faith, springing from our experience 
of the working of that order in us; it transcends knowl- 
edge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature 
asserts this faith against nature and against man in all 
their deformity, as the center about which life revolves 
so far as it has become subject to rational knowledge, to 
beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the will to live. 
Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the 
keys, the faith as nigh to the intellect as to the heart, 
to the senses as to the spirit, exceed even this limit, and 
affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge and saw 
the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold 
it as an artistic whole even now? Would it be that 
beatific vision, revolving like God's kaleidoscope, mo- 
mentarily falling at each new arrangement into the per- 
fect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief 
model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, 
only a way of limiting the field to the compass of human 



I2 4 HEART OF MAN 

faculties that we may see within our capacities as God. 
sees, and hence have such faith? Is art after all a lower 
creation than nature, a concession to our frail powers? 
Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must 
we see the evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, 
deforming beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with 
wages of death for its victims, and the hell of final de- 
struction spreading beneath its sway? so that the world 
as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God 
exercised in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of 
union with or separation from the ideal order in con- 
flict with the order of death? I recall Newman's pic- 
ture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, 
its various history, the many races of men, their starts, 
their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, 
and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of wor- 
ship ; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random 
achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion 
of longstanding facts, the tokens so faint and broken 
of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what 
turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of 
things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final 
causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far- 
reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over 
his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of 
good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, 
the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading 
idolatries, the corruption, the dreary hopeless irreli- 
gion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet 
exactly described in the Apostle's words, 'having no 
hope and without God in the world/ — all this is 
a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the 
mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 125 

beyond human solution." In the face of such a world, 
even when partially made intelligible in ideal art, dare 
we assert that fatalistic optimism which would have it 
that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I can 
find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the 
ineradicable effort arises in us to win to that world in 
the conviction that it is not indifferent in the sight of 
heaven whether we live in the order of life or that of 
death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of 
that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is 
a bringing of Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather 
becomes in our mind a function of the world's progress, 
and were its goal achieved would cease; for life would 
then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. 
So much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that 
art made perfect denies progress and is its ultimate. 
But perfection in life, as ideal art presents it, is a proph- 
ecy which enlists us as soldiers militant in its ful- 
filment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be 
that of the process; but it surely is not that of the 
state that now is in the world. 

It thus appears more and more that art is educative; 
it is the race's foreknowledge of what may be, of the 
objects of effort and the methods of their attainment 
under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in respect 
to it is the lax power they have to see in it the 
truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the con- 
tinuous reality of the things of the mind in opposition 
to the accidental and partial reality of the things of 
actuality. They think of it as an imagined instead of 
as the real world, the model of that which is in the 
evolution of that which ought to be. In history the 
climaxes of art have always outrun human realization; 



i 2 6 HEART OF MAN 

its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of 
the never-attained; but they still make on in their mass 
to the yet rising wave, which shall be of mankind uni- 
versal, if, indeed, in the cosmopolitan civilization which 
we hope for, the elements of the past, yet surviving from 
the accomplishment of single famous cities and great em- 
pires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the 
spiritual uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified 
nations of the earth. 

There remains but one last resort; for it will yet 
be urged that the impossibility of any scientific knowl- 
edge of the spiritual order is proved by the transience 
of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by another, 
there is no permanence in them. It is true that the con- 
crete world, which must be employed by art, is one of 
sense, and necessarily imports into the form of art its 
own mortality; it is, even in art, a thing that passes away. 
It is also true that the world of knowledge, which is 
the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, 
and necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, 
its hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind; it is 
a thing that grows more and more, and in growing 
sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let us con- 
sider the form and the contents separately. The element 
of mortality in the form is included in the transience 
of imagery. The poet uses the world as he knows it, 
and reflects in successive ages of literature the changing 
phases of civilization. The shepherd, the tiller of the 
soil, the warrior, the trader yield to him their language 
of the earth, the battle, and the sea; from the common 
altar he learns the speech of the gods; the elemental 
aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is 
believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 127 

of imagery. The fact that it is at first a living act or 
habit that the poet deals with, gives to his work that 
original vivacity, that direct sense of actuality, of con- 
temporaneousness, which characterizes early literatures, 
as in Homer or the Song of Roland: even the marvelous 
has in them the reality of being believed. This imagery, 
however, grows remote with the course of time; it be- 
comes capable of holding an inward meaning without 
resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it becomes 
spiritualized. The process is the same already illustrated 
in lyric form as an expression of personality; but here 
man universal enters into the image and possesses it 
impersonally on the broad human scale. The pastoral 
life, for example, then yields the forms of art which 
hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, 
as in Daphnis and Chloe, or the natural grief of elegy 
made beautiful, as in B ion's dirge, or the shepherding 
of Christ in his church on earth, as in many an English 
poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and 
shows a purely spiritual body. 

This growing inwardness of art is a main feature of 
literary history. It is illustrated on the grand scale by 
the imagery of war. In the beginning war for its own 
sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war for a cause, 
which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess 
and justifies it as an element in national life; next, war 
for love, which refines it and builds the paradox of the 
deeds of hate serving the will of courtesy; last, war for 
the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle within the 
breast. Achilles, ./Eneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight 
are the terms in this series; they mark the transforma- 
tion of his highest spiritual effort. Nature herself is 
subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely objective 



128 HEART OF MAN 

as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, 
condition of human life, she becomes the witness to 
omnipotent power in illimitable beauty and majesty, its 
infinite unknowableness, and its tender care for all 
creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the words of 
our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the pro- 
foundest of moral truths — that the beauty of the soul 
is the gift of God, out of whose eternal law it blossoms 
and has therein its ever living roots, its air and light, 
its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of 
the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they 
spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all 
his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Shall he 
not much more clothe you, ye of little faith?'' Such 
is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality 
limits it, and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It 
is only by virtue of this that man can retain the vast 
treasures of race-imagination, and continue to use them, 
such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and 
romance. The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose 
foreground is the ideal meaning. Thus even fairyland, 
and the worlds of heaven and hell, have their place in 
art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrevelant, 
just as history is in the idealization of human events. 
Its transience, then, cannot matter, except in so far as 
it loses intelligibility through changes of time, place, and 
custom, and becomes a dead language. It follows that 
that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of 
nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and 
to ineradicable beliefs in respect to the supernatural, 
is most permanent as a language; and here art in its 
most immortal creations returns again to its omnipresent 
character as a thing of the common lot. 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 129 

The transience of the contents of art may be of two 
kinds. There is a passing away of error, as there is in 
all knowledge, but such a loss need not detain attention. 
What is really in issue is the passing away of the author- 
ity of precept and example fitted to one age but not to 
another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal 
of humility for that of valor, owing to a changed empha- 
sis in the scale of virtues. The contents of art, its 
general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of our 
earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own 
age. A parallel exists in the subject-matter of the 
sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are similar 
statements of past phases of the evolution of the earth, 
its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a kindred 
example, just as the planets in their order set forth 
now the history of our system from nascent life to com- 
plete death as earths, so these ideals exhibit man's stages 
from savagery to such culture as has been attained. 
They have more than a descriptive and historical signifi- 
cance ; they retain practical vitality because the unchange- 
able element in the universe and in man's nature is in 
the main their subject-matter. It is not merely that 
the child repeats in his education, in some measure at 
least, the history of the race, and hence must still learn 
the value of bravery and humility in their order nor 
that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emo- 
tionally in the characteristic stages of past culture; but 
these various ideals of what is admirable have them- 
selves identical elements, and in those points in which 
they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity 
and temperament. The living principles of Hebrew, 
Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and feeling are 
at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such 
vitality that their results in art truly survive. 



130 HEART OF MAN 

There has been an expansion of the field, and some 
rearrangement within it; but the evolution of human 
ideals has been, in our civilization, the growth of one 
spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each re- 
incarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, 
and which is immortal. The substance in each ideal, 
its embodiment of what is cardinal in all humanity, 
remains integral. The alloy of mortality in a work of 
art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time, 
place, country, race, religion, its specific and contem- 
porary part; so great is this in detail that a strong power 
of historical imagination, the power to rebuild past con- 
ditions, is a main necessity of culture, like the study of 
a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power to 
translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in 
terms of different beliefs, must go with this; and also 
a corrective power, if the work is to be truly useful and 
enter into our lives with effect. Such an alloy there is 
in nearly all great works even; much in Homer, some- 
thing in Virgil, a considerable part of Dante, and an 
increasing portion in Milton have this mixture of death 
in them; but if by keeping to the primary, the perma- 
nent, the universal, they have escaped the natural body 
of their age, the substance of the work is still living; 
they have achieved such immortality as art allows. 
They have done so, not so much by the personal power 
of their authors as by their representative character. 
These ideal works of the highest range, which embody 
in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the 
successive incarnations of human imagination, are prod- 
ucts of race and state, of world-experience and social 
personality; they differ, race from race, civilization from 
civilization, Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or Christian, just 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 131 

as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are 
solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, 
in the element of the common reason, the common nature 
in the world and man, which they contain — in man, 

"Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless"; 

in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from 
mortality, they are mutually intelligible and interchange- 
able, they survive — racial and secular states and docu- 
ments of a spiritual evolution yet going on in all its 
stages m the human mass, still barbarous, still pagan, 
still Christian, but an evolution which at its highest 
point wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its 
beauty, its vital energy, in a forward reach. 

The nature of the changes which time brings may best 
be illustrated from the epic, and thus the opposition of 
the transient and permanent elements in art be, perhaps, 
more clearly shown. Epic action has been defined as 
the working out of the Divine will in society; hence it 
requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves 
the conflict of a higher with a lower civilization, and 
it is conducted by means of a double plot, one in heaven, 
the other on earth. These are the characteristic epic 
traits. In dealing with ideas of such importance, the 
poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found 
much adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met 
with ever fresh difficulties ; the result is a many-sided epic 
development. The idea of the Divine will, the theory 
of its operation, and the conception of society itself were 
all subject to change. Epics at first are historical; but, 
sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness 
of meaning, they become purely spiritual. The one thing 
that remains common to all is the notion of a struggle 



132 HEART OF MAN 

between a higher and a lower, overruled by Providence. 
They have two subjects of interest, one the cause, the 
other the hero through whom the cause works; and be- 
tween these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever 
identifying them and yet preserving their dual reality. 

The "Iliad" has all the traits that have been mentioned, 
but society is still loose enough in its bonds to give the 
characters free play; it is, in the main, a hero-epic. The 
"^Eneid," on the contrary, exhibits the enormous develop- 
ment of the social idea; its subject is Roman dominion, 
which is the will of Zeus, localized in the struggle with 
Carthage and with Turnus, but felt in the poem perva- 
sively as the general destiny of Rome in its victory over 
the world ; and this interest is so overpowering as to make 
^Eneas the slave of Jove and almost to extinguish the 
other characters; it is a state-epic. So long as the Divine 
will was conceived as finding its operation through deities 
similar to man, the double plot presented little difficulty; 
but in the coming of Christian thought, even with its 
hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the interpre- 
tation became arduous. In the "Jerusalem Delivered," the 
social conflict between Crusader and infidel is clear, the 
historical crisis in the wars of Palestine is rightly chosen, 
but the machinery of the heavenly plot is weakened by 
the presence of magic, and is by itself ineffectual in 
inspiring a true belief. So in the "Lusiads," while the con- 
flict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of 
colonization in the East, are clear, the machinery of the 
heavenly plot frankly reverts to mythologic and pagan 
forms and loses all credibility. 

In the "Paradise Lost" arises the spiritual epic, but still 
historically conceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall 
of man in Adam, is the most important conceivable by 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 133 

man; the powers engaged are the superior beings of 
heaven and hell in direct antagonism; but here, too, the 
machinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much 
strain, and, however strongly supported by the Scriptures, 
has little convincing power. The truth is that the Divine 
will was coming to be conceived as implicit in society, be- 
ing Providence there, and operating in secret but normal 
ways in the guidance of events, not by special and inter- 
fering acts; and also as equally implicit in the individual 
soul, the influence of the Spirit, and working in the ways 
of spiritual law. One change, too, of vast importance was 
announced by the words "The Kingdom of Heaven is 
within you." This transferred the very scene of con- 
flict, the theater of spiritual warfare, from an external 
to an internal world, and the social significance of such 
individual battle lay in its being typical of all men's 
lives. "The Faerie Queene," the most spiritual poem in 
all ways in English, is an epic in essence, though its action 
is developed by a revolution of the phases of the soul 
in succession to the eye, and not by the progress of one 
main course of events. The conflict of the higher and 
the lower under Divine guidance in the implicit sense 
is there shown; the significance is for mankind, though 
not for a society in its worldly fortunes; but there is 
little attempt to externalize the heavenly power in specific 
action in superhuman forms, though in mortal ways the 
good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. 
The celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes 
a hero-epic in almost an exclusive way; though the 
knight's achievement is also an achievement of God's will, 
the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man's 
moral victory. In the "Idyls of the King" there are 
several traits of the epic. There is the central idea of 



134 HEART OF MAN 

the conflict between the higher and lower, both on the 
social and the individual side; the victory of the Round 
Table would have meant not only pure knights but a re- 
generate state. Here, however, the externalization of 
the Divine will in the Holy Grail, and, as in the Christian 
epic generally, its confusion on the marvelous side with 
a world of enchantment passing here into the sensuous 
sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of 
"soul with sense" was the subject-matter, as was Spen- 
ser's; the method of revolution of its phases was also 
Spenser's ; but the two poems differ in the point that Spen- 
ser's knight wins, but Tennyson's king loses, so far 
as earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that 
as in Milton Adam loses, yet the final triumph of the 
cause is known and felt as a divine issue of the action 
though outside the poem, so Arthur is saved to the ideal 
by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order 
coming on, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism 
invades the poem in many details, but here at its heart; 
for Arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his own 
defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lost 
cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal 
conflict to bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its 
victory be declared except as the echo of a hope of some 
miraculous and merciful retrieval from beyond the bar- 
riers of the world to come. But in showing the different 
conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its diffi- 
culties of interpreting in sensuous imagery the working 
of the Divine will, its relaxed hold on the social move- 
ment for which it substitutes man's universal nature, 
and the mist that settles round it in its latest example, 
sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of 
time to which idealism is subject, and also of the essen- 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 135 

tial truth surviving in the works of the past, which in 
the epics is the vision of how the ends of God have been 
accomplished in the world and in the soul by the union 
of divine grace with heroic will — the interpretation and 
glorification of history and of man's single conflict in him- 
self age after age, asserting through all their range the 
supremacy of the ideal order over its foes in the entire 
race-life of man. 

Out of these changes of time, in response to the varying 
moods of men in respect to the world they inhabit, arise 
those phases of art which are described as classical and 
romantic, words of much confusion. It has been at- 
tempted to distinguish the latter as having an element 
of remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity; but to me, at 
least, classical art has the same remoteness, the same 
surprise, and answers the same curiosity as romantic art. 
If I were to endeavor to oppose them I should say that 
classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in form, 
it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emotion absorbed 
by itself, it definitely guides the will; romantic art is 
touched with mystery, it has richness and intricacy of 
form not fully comprehended, it suggests more than it 
satisfies, it stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, 
it invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is whole in 
itself and lives in the central region, the white light, of 
that star of ideality which is the light of our knowledge; 
romanticism borders on something else — the rosy corona 
round about our star, carrying on its dawning power into 
those unknown infinities which embosom the spark of 
life. The two have always existed in conjunction, the 
romantic element in ancient literature being large. But 
owing to the disclosure of the world to us in later times, 
to the deeper sense of its mysteries which are our bound- 



136 HEART OF MAN 

ing horizons round about, and especially to the im- 
pulse given to emotion by the opening of the doors of 
immortality by Christianity to thought, revery, and 
dream, to hope and effort, the romantic element has been 
more marked in modern art, has in fact characterized it, 
being fed moreover by the ever increasing inwardness 
of human life, the greater value and opportunity of per- 
sonality in a free and high civilization, and by the un- 
certainty, confusion, and complexity of such masses of 
human experience as our observation now controls. The 
romantic temper is inevitable in men whose lives are 
themselves thought of as, in form, but fragments of the 
life to come, which shall find their completion an eternal 
task. It is the natural ally of faith which it alone can 
render with an infinite outlook; and it is the complement 
of that mystery which is required to supplement it, and 
which is an abiding presence in the habit of the sensi- 
tive and serious mind. Yet in classical art the definite 
may still be rendered, the known, the conquered. Ideal- 
ism has its finished world therein; in romanticism it 
has rather its prophetic work. 

Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and rapid 
strokes, is the world of art, its methods, its appeals, its 
significance to mankind. Idealism, so presented, is in 
a sense a glorification of the commonplace. Its realm lies 
in the common lot of men; its distinction is to embrace 
truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of experience 
and personality, the primary, elementary, equally shared 
fates, passions, beliefs of the race. Shakespeare, our great 
example, as Coleridge wisely said, "kept in the highway of 
life." That is the royal road of genius, the path of immor- 
tality, the way ever trodden by the great who lead. I have 
ventured to speak at times of religious truth. What is 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 137 

the secret of Christ's undying power? Is it not that 
he stated universal truth in concrete forms of common 
experience so that it comes home to all men's bosoms? 
Genius is supreme in proportion as it does that, and 
becomes the interpreter of every man who is born into 
the world, makes him know his brotherhood with all, and 
the incorporation of his fate in the scheme of law, and 
ideal achievement under it, which is the common ground 
of humanity. Ideal literature is the treasury of such 
genius in the past; here, as I said in the beginning, the 
wisdom of the soul is stored; and art, in all its forms, 
is immortal only in so far as it has done its share in 
this same labor of illumination, persuasion, and command, 
forecasting the spirit to be, companioning the spirit that 
is, sustaining us all in the effort to make ideal order 
actual in ourselves. 

What, then, since I said that it is a question how to 
live as well as how to express life — what, then, is the 
ideal life? It is to make one's life a poem, as Milton 
dreamed of the true poet; for as art works through matter 
and takes on concrete and sensible shape with its mortal 
conditions, so the soul dips in life, is in material action, 
and, suffering a similar fate, sinks into limitations and 
externals of this world and this flesh, through which it 
must live. In such a life, mortal in all ways, to bring 
down to earth the vision that floats in the soul's eyes, 
the ideal order as it is revealed to the poet's gaze, in- 
corporating it in deed and being, and to make it prevail, 
so far as our lives have power, in the world of our life, 
is the task set for us. To disengage reason from the 
confusion of things, and behold the eternal forms of the 
mind; to unveil beauty in the transitory sights of our 
eyes, and behold the eternal forms of sense; so to act that 



138 HEART OF MAN 

the will within us shall take on this form of reason and 
our manifest life wear this form of beauty; and, more 
closely, to live in the primary affections, the noble pas- 
sions, the sweet emotions — 

"Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, 
Relations dear, and all the chanties 
Of father, son, and brother — " 

and also in the general sorrows of mankind, thereby, 
in joy and grief, entering sympathetically into the hearts 
of common men; to keep in the highway of life, not turn- 
ing aside to the eccentric, the sensational, the abnormal, 
the brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must come 
within our vision, in their place only by the edges of 
true life; and, if, being men, we are caught in the tragic 
coil, to seek the restoration of broken order, learning 
also in such bitterness better to understand the dark con- 
flict forever waging in the general heart, the terror of 
the heavy clouds hanging on the slopes of our battle, 
the pathos that looks down even from blue skies that 
have kept watch o'er man's mortality — so, even through 
failure, to draw nearer to our race; this, as I conceive 
it, is to lead the ideal life. It is a message blended of 
many voices of the poets whom Shelley called, whatever 
might be their calamity on earth, the most fortunate 
of men; it rises from all lands, all ages, all religions; it 
is the battle-cry of that one great idea whose slow and 
hesitating growth is the unfolding of our long civilization, 
seeking to realize in democracy the earthly, and in Chris- 
tianity the heavenly, hope of man — the idea of the 
community of the soul, the sameness of it in all men. 
To lead this life is to be one with man through love, one 
with the universe through knowledge, one with God 



A NEW DEFENSE OF POETRY 139 

through the will; that is its goal, toward that we strive, 
in that we believe. 

And Thou, O Youth, for whom these lines are written, 
fear not; idealize your friend, for it is better to love and 
be deceived than not to love at all; idealize your masters, 
and take Shelley and Sidney to your bosom, so shall they 
serve you more nobly and you them more sweetly than 
if the touch and sight of their mortality had been yours 
indeed; idealize your country, remembering that Brutus 
in the dagger-stroke and Cato in his death-darkness knew 
not the greater Rome, the proclaimer of the unity of 
our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher of our 
church, and died not knowing — but do you believe in 
the purpose of God, so shall you best serve the times to 
be; and in your own life, fear not to act as your ideal 
shall command, in the constant presence of that other 
self who goes with you, as I have said, so shall you blend 
with him at the end. Fear not either to believe that the 
soul is as eternal as the order that obtains in it, where- 
fore you shall forever pursue that divine beauty which 
has here so touched and inflamed you — for this is the 
faith of man, your race, and those who were fairest in 
its records. And have recourse always to the fountains 
of this life in literature, which are the wells of truth. 
How to live is the one matter; the wisest man in his 
ripe age is yet to seek in it; but Thou, begin now and 
seek wisdom in the beauty of virtue and live in its light, 
rejoicing in it; so in this world shall you live in the fore- 
gleam of the world to come. 



DEMOCRACY 

Democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; 
it is for this reason that it has its great career. Its faith 
is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of 
things unseen, whose realization will be the labor of a 
long age. The life of historic nations has been a pur- 
suit toward a goal under the impulse of ideas often 
obscurely comprehended — world-ideas as we call them 
— which they have embodied in accomplished facts and 
in the institutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting through 
ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of the 
idea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and 
conscious of greatness. That men are born equal is still 
a doctrine openly derided; that they are born free is not 
accepted without much nullifying limitation; that they 
are born in brotherhood is less readily denied. These 
three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fra- 
ternity, are the substance of democracy, if the matter 
be well considered, and all else is but consequence. 

It might seem singular that man should ever have found 
out this creed, as that physical life could invent the brain, 
since the struggle for existence in primitive and early 
times was so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and 
aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between races. 
In most parts of the world the first true governments were 
tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was 
indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood. Aristotle 

141 



142 HEART OF MAN 

speaks of slavery without repugnance save in Greeks, 
and serfdom was incorporated in the northern tribes as 
soon as they began to be socially organized. Some have 
alleged that religious equality was an Oriental idea, and 
borrowed from the relation of subjects to an Asiatic 
despot, which paved the way for it; some attribute civil 
equality to the Roman law; some find the germ of both 
in Stoical morals. But so great an idea as the equality 
of man reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. 
The state of nature of the savage in the woods, which 
our fathers once thought a pattern, bore some outward 
resemblance to a freeman's life; but such a condition is 
rather one of private independence than of the grounded 
social right that democracy contemplates. How the 
ideas involved came into historical existence is a minor 
matter. Democracy has its great career, for the first 
time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely 
its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand 
scale. Nothing is more incumbent on us than to study 
it, to turn it this way and that, to handle it as often and 
in as many phases as possible with lively curiosity, and 
not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so 
elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems 
simple. Fundamental ideas are precisely those with 
which we should be most familiar. 

Democracy is not merely a political experiment; and 
its governmental theory, though so characteristic of it 
as not to be dissociated from it, is a result of underlying 
principles. There is always an ideality of the human 
spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is 
the main thing. The States, as a social aggregate with 
a joint life which constitutes it a nation, is dynamically 
an embodiment of human conviction, desire, and tend- 



DEMOCRACY 143 

ency, with a common basis of wisdom and energy of 
action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal, 
whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and 
government is no more than the mode of administration 
under which it achieves its results both in national life 
and in the lives of its citizens. All society is a means 
of escape from personality, and its limitations of power 
and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individ- 
ual, in so far, loses his particularity, and at the same time 
intensifies and strengthens that portion of his life which 
is thus made one with the general life of men — that uni- 
versal and typical life which they have in common and 
which molds them with similar characteristics. It is 
by this fusion of the individual with the mass, this identi- 
fication of himself with mankind in a joint activity, 
this reenforcement of himself by what is himself in others, 
that a man becomes a social being. The process is the 
same, whether in clubs, societies of all kinds, sects, polit- 
ical parties, or the all-embracing body of the State. It 
is by making himself one with human nature in America, 
its faith, its methods, and the controlling purposes in 
our life among nations, and not by birth merely, that 
a man becomes an American. 

The life of society, however, includes various affairs, 
and man deals with them by different means ; thus prop- 
erty is a mode of dealing with things. Democracy is a 
mode of dealing with souls. Men commonly speak as 
if the soul were something they expect to possess in 
another world; men are souls, and this is a fundamental 
conception of democracy. This spiritual element is the 
substance of democracy, in the large sense; and the 
special governmental theory which it has developed and 
organized, and in which its ideas are partially included, 



144 HEART OF MAN 

is, like other such systems, a mode of administration 
under which it seeks to realize its ideal of what life 
ought to be, with most speed and certainty, and on 
the largest scale. What characterizes that ideal is that 
it takes the soul into account in a way hitherto unknown; 
not that other governments have not had regard to the 
soul, but, in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the 
law and rules the issue. Hence, a great preparation was 
needed before democracy could come into effective con- 
trol of society. Christianity mainly afforded this, in 
respect to the ideas of equality and fraternity, which were 
clarified and illustrated in the life of the Church for ages, 
before they entered practically into politics and the gen- 
eral secular arrangements of state organization; the 
nations of progress, of which freedom is a condition, 
developed more definitely the idea of liberty, and made 
it familiar to the thoughts of men. Democracy belongs 
to a comparatively late age of the world, and to advanced 
nations, because such ideas could come into action only 
after the crude material necessities of human progress — 
illustrated in the warfare of nations, in military organi- 
zations for the extension of a common rule and culture 
among mankind, and in despotic impositions of order, 
justice, and the general ideas of civilization — had re- 
laxed, and a free course, by comparison at least, was 
opened for the higher nature of man in both private 
and public action. A conception of the soul and its 
destiny, not previously applicable in society, underlies 
democracy; this is why it is the most spiritual govern- 
ment known to man, and therefore the highest reach of 
man's evolution; it is, in fact, the spiritual element in 
society expressing itself now in politics with an unsus- 
pected and incalculable force. 



DEMOCRACY 145 

Democracy is contained in the triple statement that 
men are born free, equal, and in brotherhood; and in 
this formula it is the middle term that is cardinal, and 
the root of all. Yet it is the doctrine of the equality of 
man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is 
clothed entire at birth, that is most attacked, as an ob- 
vious absurdity, and provocative more of laughter than 
of argument. What, then, is this equality which de- 
mocracy affirms as the true state of all men among them- 
selves? It is our common human nature, that identity 
of the soul in all men, which was first inculcated by the 
preaching of Christ's death for all equally, whence it 
followed that every human soul was of equal value in the 
eyes of God, its Creator, and had the same title to the 
rites of the Christian Church, and the same blessedness 
of an infinite immortality in the world to come; thence 
we derived it from the very fountain of our faith, and 
the first true democracy was that which leveled king 
and peasant, barbarian and Roman, in the communion 
of our Lord. Yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such 
inequalities at birth itself as make our peremptory 
charter of the value of men's souls seem a play of fancy. 
There are men of almost divine intelligence, men of almost 
devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; 
and they are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped 
into them heredity, circumstance, and the physical con- 
ditions of sanity, morality and wholesomeness, in the 
body which is her work. Such differences do exist, and 
conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which 
accumulates inequalities in the struggle for life, "with 
ravin shrieks against our creed." But we have not now 
to learn for the first time that nature, though not the 
enemy of the human spirit, is indifferent to all the soul 



146 HEART OF MAN 

has erected in man's own realm, peculiar to humanity. 
What has nature contributed to the doctrine of freedom 
or of fraternity? Man's life to her is all one, tyrant or 
slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, 
holy or profane, so long as her imperative physical con- 
ditions of life, the mortal thing, are conformed to ; society 
itself is not her care, nor civilization, nor anything that 
belongs to man above the brute. Her word, conse- 
quently, need not disturb us; she is not our oracle. It 
rather belongs to us to win further victory over her, if 
it may be, by our intelligence, and control her vital, as 
we are now coming to control her material, powers and 
their operation. 

This equality which democracy affirms — the identity 
of the soul, the sameness of its capacities of energy, knowl- 
edge, and enjoyment — draws after it as a consequence 
the soul's right to opportunity for self-development by 
virtue of which it may possess itself of what shall be 
its own fullness of life. In the inscrutable mystery of 
this world, the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, 
made such both by inherent conditions and by external 
limitations, in individuals, classes, and races; but the de- 
termination of democracy is that, so far as may be, it 
will secure equality of opportunity to every soul born 
within its dominion, in the expectation that much in 
human conditions which has hitherto fed and heightened 
inequality, in both heredity and circumstance, may be 
lessened if not eradicated; and life after birth is sub- 
ject to great control. This is the meaning of the first 
axiom of democracy, that all have a right to the pursuit 
of happiness, and its early cries — "an open career," 
and "the tools to him who can use them." In this effort 
society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature; for in 



DEMOCRACY 147 

human history the accumulation of the selfish advantage 
of inequality has told with as much effect as ever it did 
in the original struggle of reptile and beast; and in our 
present complex and extended civilization a slight gain 
over the mass entails a telling mortgage of the future 
to him who makes it and to his heirs, while efficiency 
is of such high value in such a society that it must needs 
be favored to the utmost; on the other hand a complex 
civilization encourages a vast variety of talent, and finds 
a special place for that individuation of capacity which 
goes along with social evolution. The end, too, which 
democracy seeks is not a sameness of specific results, 
but rather an equivalence; and its duty is satisfied if 
the child of its rule finds such development as was pos- 
sible to him, has a free course, and cannot charge his 
deficiency to social interference and the restriction of 
established law. 

The great hold that the doctrine of equality has 
upon the masses is not merely because it furnishes 
the justification of the whole scheme, which is a logic 
they may be dimly conscious of, but that it establishes 
their title to such good in human life as they can 
obtain, on the broadest scale and in the fullest measure. 
What other claim, so rational and noble in itself, can 
they put forth in the face of what they find established 
in the world they are born into? The results of past 
civilization are still monopolized by small minorities of 
mankind, who receive by inheritance, under natural and 
civil law, the greater individual share of material comfort, 
of large intelligence, of fortunate careers. It does not 
matter that the things which belong to life as such, the 
greater blessings essential to human existence, cannot be 
monopolized ; all that man can take and appropriate they 



148 HEART OF MAN 

find preoccupied so far as human discovery and energy 
have been able to reach, understand, and utilize it; and 
what proposition can they assert as against this sequester- 
ing of social results and material and intellectual oppor- 
tunity, except to say, "we, too, are men," and with the 
word to claim a share in such parts of social good as 
are not irretrievably pledged to men better born, better 
educated, better supplied with the means of subsistence 
and the accumulated hoard of the past, which has come 
into their hands by an award of fortune? It is not a 
fanciful idea. It is founded in the unity of human 
nature, which is as certain as any philosophic truth, and 
has been proclaimed by every master-spirit of our race 
time out of mind. It is supported by the universal faith, 
in which we are bred, that we are children of a common 
Father, and saved by one Redeemer and destined to one 
immortality, and cannot be balked of the fullness of life 
which was our gift under Divine Providence. I empha- 
size the religious basis, because I believe it is the rock 
of the foundation in respect to this principle, which can- 
not be successfully impeached by any one who accepts 
Christian truth; while in the lower sphere, on worldly 
grounds alone, it is plain that the immense advantage of 
the doctrine of equality to the masses of men, justi- 
fies the advancement of it as an assumption which they 
call on the issue in time to approve. 

It is in this portion of the field that democracy relies 
most upon its prophetic power. Within the limits of 
nature and mortal life the hope of any equal develop- 
ment of the soul seems folly; yet, so far as my judgment 
extends, in men of the same race and community it 
appears to me that the sameness in essentials is so great 
as to leave the differences inessential, so far as power 



DEMOCRACY 149 

to take hold of life and possess it in thought, will, or 
feeling is in question. I do not see, if I may continue 
to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in 
duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense 
of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference 
among those of the same community; and this is reason- 
able, for the permanent relations of life, in families, in 
social ties, in public service, and in all that the belief 
in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men's 
lives, are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of 
fortunate lives, esthetic and intellectual goods may be 
more important than among the common people, these 
are less penetrating and go not to the core, which re- 
mains life as all know it — a thing of affection, of resolve, 
of service, of use to those to whom it may be of human 
use. Is it not reasonable, then, on the ground of what 
makes up the substance of life within our observation, to 
accept this principle of equality, fortified as it is by any 
conception of heaven's justice to its creatures? and to 
assume, if the word must be used, the principle primary 
in democracy, that all men are equally endowed with 
destiny? and thus to allow its prophetic claim, till dis- 
proved, that equal opportunity, linked with the service 
of the higher to the lower, will justify its hope? At all 
events, in this lies the possibility of greater achievement 
than would otherwise be attained within our national 
limits; and what is found to be true of us may be ex- 
tended to less developed communities and races in their 
degree. 

The doctrine of the equality of mankind by virtue of 
their birth as men, with its consequent right to equality 
of opportunity for self-development as a part of social 
justice, establishes a common basis of conviction, in 



150 HEART OF MAN 

respect to man, and a definite end as one main object 
of the State; and these elements are primary in the demo- 
cratic scheme. Liberty is the next step, and is the means 
by which that end is secured. It is so cardinal in democ- 
racy as to seem hardly secondary to equality in impor- 
tance. Every State, every social organization whatever, 
implies a principle of authority commanding obedience; 
it may be of the absolute type of military and ecclesias- 
tical use, or limited, as in constitutional monarchies; but 
some obedience and some authority are necessary in 
order that the will of the State may be realized. The 
problem of democracy is to find that principle of au- 
thority which is most consistent with the liberty it would 
establish, and which acts with the greatest furtherance 
and the least interference in the accomplishment of the 
chief end in view. It composes authority, therefore, of 
personal liberty itself, and derives it from the consent 
of the governed, and not merely from their consent but 
from their active decree. The social will is impersonal, 
generic, the will of man, not of men; particular wills 
enter into it, and make it, so constituted, themselves in 
a larger and external form. The citizen has parted with 
no portion of his freedom of will; the will of the State 
is still his own will, projected in unison with other wills, 
all jointly making up one sum — the authority of the 
nation. This is social self-government — not the anarchy 
of individuals each having his own way for himself, but 
government through a delegated self, if one may use the 
phrase, organically combined with others in the single 
power of control belonging to a State. This fusion is 
accomplished in the secondary stage, for the continuous 
action of the State, by representation, technically; but, 
in its primary stage and original validity, by universal 



DEMOCRACY 151 

suffrage; for the characteristic trait of democracy is that 
in constituting this authority, which is social as opposed 
to personal freedom — personal freedom existing in its 
social form — it includes every unit of will, and gives to 
each equivalence. Democracy thus establishes the will of 
society in its most universal form, lying between the oppo- 
site extremes of particularism in despotism and anarchy; 
it owns the most catholic organ of authority, and enters 
into it with the entire original force of the community. 

This universal will of democracy is distinguished from 
the more limited forms of states partially embodying 
democratic principles by the fact that nothing enters 
into it except man as such. The rival powers which seek 
to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in 
a pure democracy, are education, property, and ancestry, 
which last has its claim as the custodian of education and 
property and the advantage flowing from their long pos- 
session; the trained mind, the accumulated capital, and 
the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its most in- 
tense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, 
and would appropriate to themselves in the structure of 
government a representation not based on individual 
manhood but on other grounds. If it be still allowed that 
all men should have a share in a self-government, it is 
yet maintained that a share should be granted, in addi- 
tion, to educated men and owners of property, and to 
descendants of such men who have founded permanent 
families with an inherited capacity, a tradition, and a 
material stake. Yet these three things, education, prop- 
erty, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those ine- 
qualities in human conditions which democracy would 
minimize. They embody past custom and present results 
which are a deposit of the past; they plead that they 



152 HEART OF MAN 

found men wards and were their guardians, and that 
under their own domination progress was made and all 
that now is came into being; but they must show farther 
some reason in present conditions under democracy now 
why such potent inequalities and breeds of inequality 
should be clothed with governing power. 

Universal suffrage is the center of the discussion, and 
the argument against it is twofold. It is said that, though 
much in the theory of democracy may be granted and its 
methods partially adopted, men at large lack the wisdom 
to govern themselves for good in society, and also that 
they control by their votes much more than is rightfully 
their own. The operation of the social will is in large 
concerns of men requiring knowledge and skill, and it 
has no limits. In state affairs education should have 
authority reserved to it, and certain established interests, 
especially the rights of property, should be exempted 
from popular control; and the effectual means of securing 
these ends is to magnify the representatives of education 
and property to such a degree that they will retain decid- 
ing power. But is this so? or if there be some truth in 
the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic 
scheme and reconciled with it? And, to begin with, is 
education, in the special sense, so important in the funda- 
mental decisions which the suffrage makes? I speak, of 
course, of literary education. It may well be the case 
that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed 
and sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that 
the good of society is for all in common, and being, from 
the political point of view, in the main, a material good, 
comes home to their business and bosoms in the most 
direct and universal way, in their comfort or deprivation, 
in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and 



DEMOCRACY 153 

those wide-extended results of national policies which are 
the evidence and the facts. Politics is very largely, and 
one might almost say normally, a conflict of material 
interests; ideas dissociated from action are not its sphere; 
the way in which policies are found immediately to 
affect human life is their political significance. On the 
broad scale, who is a better judge of their own material 
condition and the modifications of it from time to time, 
of what they receive and what they need from political 
agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by 
what is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these 
men make the masses? Experience is their touchstone, 
and it is an experience universally diffused. Education, 
too, is a word that will bear interpretation. It is not 
synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native 
in men, and, though increased by education, not con- 
ditioned upon it. Intelligence, in the limited sphere in 
which the unlearned man applies it, in the things he 
knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating, com- 
prehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically edu- 
cated man; for he is educated by things, and especially 
in those matters which touch his own interests, widely 
shared. The school of life embodies a compulsory edu- 
cation that no man escapes. If politics, then, be in the 
main a conflict of material interests broadly affecting 
masses of men, the people, both individually and as a 
body, may well be more competent to deal with the mat- 
ter in hand intelligently than those who, though highly 
educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pres- 
sure of things and feel results and also conditions, even 
widely prevalent, at a less early stage and with less 
hardship, and at best in very mild forms. Besides, to 
put it grossly, it is often not brains that are required to 



154 HEART OF MAN 

diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. The 
sphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is 
really limited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, 
the selfish struggle of material interests in a vast and 
diversified State. 

Common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, 
well known to the people in their state of life, and also 
a test of any general policy once put into operation. 
The capacity of the people to judge the event in the 
long run must be allowed. But does broad human ex- 
perience, however close and pressing, contain that fore- 
cast of the future, that right choice of the means of bet- 
terment or even knowledge of the remedy itself, which 
belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? 
I am not well assured that it is not so. The masses have 
been long in existence, and what affects them is seldom 
novel ; they are of the breed that through 

"old experience do attain 
To something like prophetic strain." 

The sense of the people, learning from their fathers and 
their mothers, sums up a vast amount of wisdom in com- 
mon life, and more surely than in others the half-con- 
scious tendencies of the times; for in them these are 
vital rather than reflective, and go on by the forces of 
universal conditions, hopes, and energies. In them, too, 
intelligence works in precisely the same way as in other 
men, and in politics precisely as in other parts of life. 
They listen to those they trust who, by neighborhood, 
by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual 
share in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund 
of information, are qualified to be their leaders in forming 
opinion and their instruments in the policy they adopt. 



DEMOCRACY 155 

These leaders may be called demagogues. They may 
be thought to employ only resources of trickery upon 
dupes for selfish ends; but such a view, generally, is 
a shallow one, and not justified by facts. It is right in 
the masses to make men like themselves and nigh to 
them, especially those born and bred in their own con- 
dition of life, their leaders, in preference to men, how- 
ever educated, benevolent, and upright, who are not em- 
bodiments of the social conditions, needs, and aspirations 
of the people in their cruder life, if it in fact substantially 
be so, and to allow these men, so chosen, to find a leader 
among themselves. Such a man is a true chief of a 
party, who is not an individual holding great interests 
in trust and managing them with benevolent despotism 
by virtue of his own superior brain; he is the incarnation, 
as a party chief, of other brains and wills, a representa- 
tive exceeding by far in wisdom and power himself, 
a man in whom the units of society, millions of them, 
have their governmental life. No doubt he has great 
qualities of sympathy, comprehension, understanding, 
tact, efficient power, in order to become a chief; but he 
leads by following, he relies on his sense of public sup- 
port, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common 
sense, which store themselves in him. Such the leaders 
of the people have always been. 

If this process — and it is to be observed that as the 
scale of power rises the more limited elements of social 
influence enter into the result with more determining 
force — be apparently crude in its early stages, and im- 
perfect at the best, is it different from the process of 
social expansion in other parts of life? Wherever 
masses of men are entering upon a rising and larger life, 
do not the same phenomena occur? in religion, for ex- 



156 HEART OF MAN 

ample, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it is 
termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the 
Methodist movement, in the Presbyterian movement, 
in the Protestant movement, world-wide? Was English 
Puritanism free from the same sort of characteristics, 
the things that are unrefined, as belong to democratic 
politics in another sphere? The method, the phenomena, 
are those that belong to life universal, if life be free and 
efficient in moving masses of men upward into more noble 
ranges. Men of the people lead, because the people are 
the stake. On the other hand, educated leaders, however 
well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not 
rooted deeply in the popular soil. Literary education, 
it must never be forgotten, is not specially a preparation 
for political good judgment. It is predominantly con- 
cerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immedi- 
ate political consequence — with books generally, science, 
history, language, technical processes and trades, pro- 
fessional outfits, and the manifold activity of life not 
primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political. 
Men of education, scholars especially, even in the field 
of political system, are not by the mere fact of their 
scholarship highly or peculiarly fitted to take part in 
the active leadership of politics, unless they have other 
qualifications not necessarily springing from their pur- 
suits in learning; they are naturally more engaged with 
ideas in a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas 
which are in reality as much a part of life as of thought; 
and the method of dealing with these vitalized and, as 
it were, adulterated ideas has a specialty of its own. 

It must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the 
educated class as a whole has commonly been found to 
entertain a narrow view; it has been on the side of the 



DEMOCRACY 157 

past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionary 
era the class was not — though it is now coming to be — 
a germinating element in reform, except in isolated cases 
of high genius which foresees the times to come and 
develops principles by which they come; it has been, 
even during our era, normally in alliance with property 
and ancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, 
and like them is deeply engaged in the established order, 
under which it is comfortable, enjoying the places there 
made for its functions, and is conservative of the past, 
doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, 
often a note of despair. I do not forget the great excep- 
tions; but revolutions have come from below, from the 
masses and their native leaders, however they may occa- 
sionally find some preparation in thinkers, and some wel- 
come in aristocrats. The power of intellectual educa- 
tion as an element in life is always overvalued ; and, within 
its sphere, which is less than is represented, it is sub- 
ject to error, prejudice, and arrogance of its own; and, 
being without any necessary connection with love or 
conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, 
or selfish force in politics and events, even when well 
acquainted with the field of politics, as ever were any 
of the forms of demagogy in the popular life. Intelli- 
gence, in the form of high education, can make no au- 
thoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its his- 
tory, or, as a rule, its successful examples in character. 
The suffrage, except as by natural modes it embodies the 
people's practical and general intelligence, in direct deci- 
sions and in the representatives of themselves whom it 
elects to serve the State, need not look to high education 
as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leading 
in matters of fundamental concern; education remains 



158 HEART OF MAN 

useful, as expert knowledge is always useful in matters 
presently to be acted on; but in so far as it is separable 
from the business of the State, and stands by itself in a 
class not servants of the State and mainly critical and 
traditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust 
because of any superiority of judgment it may allege. 
In fact, education has entered with beneficent effect into 
political life with the more power, in proportion as it 
has become a common and not a special endowment, and 
the enfranchisement of education, if 1 may use the term, 
is rather a democratic than an aristocratic trait. Edu- 
cation, high education even, is more respected and counts 
for more in a democracy than under the older systems. 
But in a democracy it remains true, that so far as edu- 
cation deserves weight, it will secure it by its own re- 
sources, and enter into political results, as property does, 
with a power of its own. There, least of all, does it need 
privilege. Education is one inequality which democracy 
seems already dissolving. 

What suffrage records, in opposition it may be to edu- 
cated opinion, as such, is the mental state of the people, 
and their choices of the men they trust with the accom- 
plishment of what is to be done. If the suffrage is ex- 
posed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dullness and 
ignorance, which I by no means admit, the remedy lies 
not in a guardianship of the people by the educated class, 
but in popular education itself, in lower forms, and the 
diffusion of that general information which, in conjunc- 
tion with sound morals, is all that is required for the 
comprehension of the great questions decided by suffrage, 
and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisions 
into effect. The vast increase of this kind of intelligence, 
bred of such schools and such means for the spread of 



DEMOCRACY 159 

political information as have grown up here, has been a 
measureless gain to man in many other than political 
ways. No force has been so great, except the discussion 
of religious dogma and practice under the Reformation 
in northern nations, in establishing a mental habit 
throughout the community. The suffrage also has this 
invaluable advantage, that it brings about a substitution 
of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as the 
normal mode of dealing with important differences of 
view in State affairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary 
of free speech, and the preservative of that great ele- 
ment of liberty, and progress under liberty, which is not 
otherwise well safeguarded. It is also a continuous 
thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as 
they arise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing 
too great an accumulation of discontent, it avoids revo- 
lution, containing in itself the right of revolution in a 
peaceable form under law. It is, moreover, a school into 
which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable 
of receiving great masses of men and accustoming them 
to political thought, free and efficient action in political 
affairs, and a civil life in the State, breeding in them 
responsibility for their own condition and that of the 
State. It is the voice of the people always speaking; 
nor is it to be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, 
that the questions which come before the suffrage for 
settlement are, in view of the whole complex and historic 
body of the State, comparatively few; for society and its 
institutions, as the fathers handed them down, are 
accepted at birth and by custom and with real venera- 
tion, as our birthright — the birthright of a race, 
a nation, and a hearth. The suffrage does not under- 
take to rebuild from the foundations; the people are 



160 HEART OF MAN 

slow to remove old landmarks ; but it does mean to modify 
and strengthen this inheritance of past ages for the better 
accomplishment of the ends for which society exists, and 
the better distribution among men of the goods which 
it secures. 

Fraternity, the third constituent of democracy, en- 
forces the idea of equality through its doctrine of brother- 
hood, and enlarges the idea of liberty, which thus becomes 
more than an instrument for obtaining private ends, is 
inspired with a social spirit and has bounds set to its 
exercise. Fraternity leads us, in general, to share our 
good, and to provide others with the means of sharing 
in it. This good is inexhaustible, and makes up welfare 
in the State, the common weal. It is in the sphere of 
fraternity, in particular, that humanitarian ideas, and 
those expressions of the social conscience which we call 
moral issues, generally arise, and enter more or less com- 
pletely into political life. In defining politics as, in the 
main, a selfish struggle of material interests, this was 
reserved, that, from time to time, questions of a higher 
order do arise, such as that of slavery in our history, which 
have in them a finer element; and, though it be true 
that government has in charge a race which is yet so 
near to the soil that it is never far from want, and therefore 
government must concern itself directly and continuously 
with arrangements for our material welfare, yet the higher 
life has so far developed that matters which concern it 
more intimately are within the sphere of political action, 
and among these we reckon all those causes which appeal 
immediately to great principles, to liberty, justice, and 
manhood, as things apart from material gain or loss, and 
in our consciousness truly spiritual ; and such a cause, pre- 
eminently, was the war for the Union, heavy as it was 



DEMOCRACY 161 

with the fate of mankind under democracy. In such 
crises, which seldom arise, material good is subordinated 
for the time being, and life and property, our great per- 
manent interests, are held cheap in the balance with that 
which is their great charter of value, as we conceive our 
country. 

Yet even here material interests are not far distant. 
Such issues are commonly found to be involved with 
material interests in conflict, or are alloyed with them in 
the working out; and these interests are a constituent, 
though, it may be, not the controlling matter. It is com- 
monly felt, indeed, that some warrant of material neces- 
sity is required in any great political act, for politics, as 
has been said, is an affair of life, not of free ideas; and 
without such a plain authorization reform is regarded 
as an invasion of personal liberty of thought, expres- 
sion, or action, which is the breeding-place of progressive 
life and therefore carefully guarded from intrusion. In 
proportion as the material interests are less clearly af- 
fected injuriously, a cause is removed into the region of 
moral suasion, and loses political vigor. Religious issues 
constitute the extreme of political action without regard 
to material interests, wars of conversion being their ulti- 
mate, and they are more potent with less developed races. 
For this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere of 
fraternity lies generally outside of politics, in social insti- 
tutions and habits, which political action may sometimes 
favor as in public charities, but which usually rely on 
other resources for their support. On occasions of crisis, 
however, a great idea may marshal the whole com- 
munity in its cause; and, more and more, the cause so 
championed under democracy is the spiritual right of man. 

But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty 



1 62 HEART OF MAN 

in that principle of persuasion which has been spoken 
of already, and in that substitution of it for force, in 
the conduct of human affairs, which democracy has made, 
as truly as it has replaced tyranny with the authority 
of a delegated and representative liberty. Persuasion, 
in its moral form, outside of politics — which is so largely 
resorted to in a community that does not naturally regard 
the imposition of virtue, even, with favor, but believes 
virtue should be voluntary in the man and decreed by him 
out of his own soul — need not be enlarged upon here; 
but in its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind 
and will necessarily precedent to political action, it may 
be glanced at, since law thus becomes the embodied per- 
suasion of the community, and is itself no longer force in 
the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which it is 
adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyr- 
anny, recognize the different character it bears to arbi- 
trary power as that has historically been. But outside 
of this refinement of thought in the analysis, the fact that 
the normal attitude of any cause in a democracy is that 
men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, 
before it can impose itself as the will of the State on its 
citizens, marks a regard for men as a brotherhood of 
equals and freemen, of the highest consequence in State 
affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habit upon 
the rest of life. 

That portion of the community which is not reached 
by persuasion, and remains in opposition, must obey the 
law, and submit, such is the nature of society; but 
minorities have acknowledged rights, which are best 
preserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be 
useful to all in turn. These rights are more respected 
under democracy than in any other form of government. 



DEMOCRACY 163 

The important question here, however, is not the con- 
duct of the State toward an opposition in general, which 
is at another time of a different element, and is a shift- 
ing, changeable, and temporary thing; but of its attitude 
toward the more permanent and inveterate minority exist- 
ing in class interests, which are exposed to popular at- 
tack. The capital instance is property, especially in the 
form of wealth; and here belongs that objection to the 
suffrage, which was lightly passed over, to the effect that, 
since the social will has no limits, to constitute it by 
suffrage is to give the people control of what is not their 
own. Property, reenforced by the right of inheritance, 
is the great source of inequality in the State and the 
continuer of it, and gives rise perpetually to political 
and social questions, attended with violent passions; but 
it is an institution common to civilization, it is very 
old, and it is bound up intimately with the motive energies 
of individual life, the means of supplying society on a 
vast scale with production, distribution, and communi- 
cation, and the process of taking possession of the earth 
for man's use. Its social service is incalculable. At 
times, however, when accumulated so as to congest society, 
property has been confiscated in enormous amounts, as 
in England under Henry VIII., in France at the Revolu- 
tion, and in Italy in recent times. The principle of 
paramount right over it in society has been established 
in men's minds, and is modified only by the social con- 
viction that this right is one to be exercised with the 
highest degree of care and on the plainest dictates of a 
just necessity. Taxation, nevertheless, though a power 
to destroy and confiscate in its extreme exercise, normally 
takes nothing from property that is not due. It is not 
a levy of contributions, but the collection of a just debt; 



164 HEART OF MAN 

for property and its owners are the great gainers by 
society, under whose bond alone wealth finds security, 
enjoyment, and increase, carrying with them untold 
private advantages. Property is deeply indebted to 
society in a thousand ways; and, besides, much of its 
material cannot be said to be earned, but was given either 
from the great stores of nature, or by the hand of the 
law, conferring privilege, or from the overflowing incre- 
ments of social progress. If it is naturally selfish, ac- 
quisitive, and conservative, if it has to be subjected to 
control, if its duties have to be thrust upon it often- 
times, it has such powers of resistance that there need 
be little fear lest it should suffer injustice. Like edu- 
cation, it has great reserves of influence, and is assured 
of enormous weight in the life of the community. Other 
vested interests stand in a similar relation to the State. 
These minorities, which are important and lasting ele- 
ments in society, receive consideration, and bounds are 
set to liberty of dealing adversely with them in practice, 
under that principle of fraternity which seeks the good 
of one in all and the good of all in one. 

Fraternity, following lines whose general sense has 
been sufficiently indicated, has, in particular, established 
out of the common fund public education as a means of 
diffusing intellectual gain, which is the great element of 
growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into 
all parts of the body politic a comprehension of the 
governmental scheme and the organized life of the com- 
munity, fusing its separate interests in a mutual under- 
standing and regard. It has established, too, protection 
in the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor 
as against the rich, the citizen as against those who would 
trustee the State for this own benefit; and, on the broad 



DEMOCRACY 165 

scale, it provides for the preservation of the public 
health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all children, 
and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with 
its salutary justice. It has, again, in another great field, 
established toleration, not in religion merely, but of opin- 
ion and practice in general ; and thereby largely has built 
up a mutual and pervading faith in the community as 
a body in all its parts and interests intending democratic 
results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit 
of reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty — 
a respect that awaits social justice giving time for it to 
be brought about — which as a constituent of national 
character cannot be too highly prized. 

The object of all government, and of every social sys- 
tem is, in its end and summary, to secure justice among 
mankind. Justice is the most sacred word of men; but 
it is a thing hard to find. Law, which is its social instru- 
ment, deals with external act, general conditions, and man- 
kind in the mass. It is not, like conscience, a searcher 
of men's bosoms; its knowledge extends no farther than 
to what shall illuminate the nature of the event it ex- 
amines; it makes no true ethical award. It is in the 
main a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly 
practical in intent, applied to recurring states of fact; 
it is a reasonable arrangement for the peaceful facilitation 
of human business of all social kinds, and to a con- 
siderable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon 
what shall be done in certain sets of circumstances, as an 
approximation, it may be, to justice, but, at all events, 
as an advantageous solution of difficulties. This is as 
true of its criminal as of its civil branches. Its concern 
is with society rather than the individual, and it sacri- 
fices the individual to society without compunction, ap- 



1 66 HEART OF MAN 

plying one rule to all alike, with a view to social, not 
individual, results, on the broad scale. Those matters 
which make individual justice impossible — especially 
the element of personal responsibility in wrongdoing, 
how the man came to be what he is and his suscep- 
tibility to motives, to reason and to passion, in their 
varieties, and all such considerations — law ignores in 
the main question, however it may admit them in the 
imperfect form in which only they can be known, as cir- 
cumstances in extenuation or aggravation. This large 
part of responsibility, it will seem to every reflective 
moralist, enters little into the law's survey; and its penal- 
ties, at best, are "the rack of this rude world.'' Death 
and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for the pro- 
tection of society, not for reformation, though the philan- 
thropic element in the State may use the period of im- 
prisonment with a view to reformation; nor in the his- 
tory of the punishment of crime, of the vengeance as such 
taken on men in addition to the social protection sought, 
has society on the whole been less brutal in its repulse of 
its enemies than they were in their attack, or shown any 
eminent justice toward its victims in the sphere of their 
own lives. It is a terrible and debasing record, up to 
this century at least, and uniformly corrupted those who 
were its own instruments. It was the application of force 
in its most material forms, and dehumanized those upon 
whom it was exercised, placing them outside the pale of 
manhood as a preliminary to its work. The lesson that 
the criminal remains a man, was one taught to the law, 
not learned from it. On the civil side, likewise, similar 
reservations must be made, both as regards its formula- 
tion and operation. The law as an instrument of justice 
is a rough way of dealing with the problems of the 



DEMOCRACY 167 

individual in society, but it is effective for social ends; 
and, in its total body and practical results, it is a price- 
less monument of human righteousness, sagacity, and 
mercy, and though it lags behind opinion, as it must, 
and postpones to a new age the moral and prudential 
convictions of the present, it is in its treasury that these 
at last are stored. 

If such be the case within the law, what indifference 
to justice does the course of events exhibit in the world 
at large which comes under the law's inquisition so im- 
perfectly! How continuous and inevitable, how terrible 
and pitiful is this aspect of life, is shown in successive 
ages by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in poem, 
drama, and tale, in which the noble nature through some 
frailty, that was but a part, and by the impulse of some 
moment of brief time, comes to its wreck; and, in con- 
nection with this disaster to the best, lies the action of 
the villain everywhere overflowing in suffering and injury 
upon his victims and all that is theirs. What is here 
represented as the general lot of mankind, in ideal works, 
exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives and fortunes 
of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice always 
present. The sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened 
by aught of vengeance that may overtake the wrong- 
doer; and it is constant. The murdered man, the 
wronged woman, can find no reparation. What shall 
one say of the sufferings of children and of the old, and 
of the great curse that lies in heredity and the circum- 
stances of early life and depraved, ignorant, or malicious 
conditions? These brutalities, like the primeval struggle 
in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heard the 
name of justice. The main seat of individual justice and 
its operation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, 



1 68 HEART OF MAN 

governing their own conduct, and modifying so far as 
possible the mass of injustice continually arising in the 
process of life, by such relief as they can give by per- 
sonal influence and action both on persons and in the 
realm of moral opinion. 

But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the 
rude power of the law over men in the mass, where in- 
dividuality may be neglected, there remains that portion 
of the field in which the cause of justice may be ad- 
vanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the con- 
fiscation of the French lands, the abolition of the poor 
debtor laws, and in similar great measures of class legis- 
lation, if you will. I confess I am one of those who hold 
that society is largely responsible even for crime and 
pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined con- 
ditions in the community by which there exists an in- 
veterate injustice ingrained in the structure of society 
itself. The process of freeing man from the fetters of the 
past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still 
early in its manifestation; social justice is the cry under 
which this progress is made, and, being grounded in ma- 
terial conditions and hot with men's passions under wrong, 
it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes revolution- 
ary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to 
society as in the ways without number that it has opened 
for the doing of justice to men in masses, for the molding 
of safe and orderly methods of change, and for the forma- 
tion as a part of human character of a habit of philan- 
thropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be 
partly laid to the door of society itself? Charity, great 
as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot upon any scale 
cure poverty and its attendant ills; nor can mercy, how- 
ever humanely and wisely exerted, do more than mollify 



DEMOCRACY 169 

the misfortune that abides in the criminal. Social jus- 
tice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, 
embodied in institutions and laws, as shall diminish, so 
far as under nature and human nature is possible, the 
differences of men at birth, and in their education, and 
in their opportunity through life, to the end that all 
citizens shall be equal in the power to begin and conduct 
their lives in morals, industry, and the hope of happiness. 
Social justice, so defined, under temporal conditions, de- 
mocracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in 
governmental ways; some advance has been made; but 
it requires no wide survey, nor long examination, to see 
that what has been accomplished is a beginning, with 
the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such as 
the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. 
What matters it? It is not only poets who dream; jus- 
tice is the statesman's dream. 

Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. 
They have been working now for a century in a great 
nation, not wholly unfettered and on a complete scale 
even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader 
application than elsewhere in the world, and with most 
prosperity in those parts of the country where they are 
most mastering; and the nation has grown great in their 
charge. What, in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, 
so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the con- 
figuration of a national life? The diffusion of material 
comfort among masses of men, on a scale and to an 
amount abolishing peasantry forever; the dissemination 
of education, which is the means of life to the mind as 
comfort is to the body, no more in narrow bounds, but 
through the State universal, abolishing ignorance; the de- 
velopment of human capacity in intelligence, energy, 



170 HEART OF MAN 

and character, under the stimulus of the open career, with 
a result in enlarging and concentrating the available talent 
of the State to a compass and with an efficiency and 
diversity by which alone was possible the material sub- 
jugation of the continent which it has made tributary to 
man's life; the planting of self-respect in millions of 
men, and of respect for others grounded in self-respect 
constituting a national characteristic now first to be found, 
and to be found in the bosom of every child of our soil, 
and, with this, of a respect for womanhood, making the 
common ways safe and honorable for her, unknown be- 
fore; the molding of a conservative force, so sure, so 
deep, so instinctive, that is has its seat in the very vitals 
of the State and there maintains as its blood and bone 
the principles which the fathers handed down in insti- 
tutions containing our happiness, security, and destiny, 
yet maintains them as a living present, not as a dead 
past; the incorporation into our body politic of millions 
of half-alien people, without disturbance, and with an 
assimilating power that proves the universal value of 
democracy as a mode of dealing with the race, as it now 
is; an enthronement of reason as the sole arbiter in a 
free forum where every man may plead, and have the 
judgment of all men upon the cause; a rooted repugnance 
to use force; an aversion to war; a public and private 
generosity that knows no bounds of sect, race, or climate ; 
a devotion to public duty that excuses no man and least 
of all the best, and has constantly raised the standard of 
character; a commiseration for all unfortunate peoples 
and warm sympathy with them in their struggles; a love 
of country as inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is unparal- 
leled in ardor; and a will to serve the world for the rise 
of man into such manhood as we have achieved, such 



DEMOCRACY 171 

prosperity as earth has yielded us, and such justice as, 
by the grace of heaven, is established within our borders. 
Is it not a great work? and all these blessings, unconfined 
as the element, belong to all our people. In the course 
of these results, the imperfection of human nature and 
its institutions has been present; but a just comparison 
of our history with that of other nations, ages, and sys- 
tems, and of our present with our past, shows that such 
imperfection in society has been a diminishing element with 
us, and that a steady progress has been made in methods, 
measures, and men. No great issue, in a whole century, 
has been brought to a wrong conclusion. Our public 
life has been starred with illustrious names, famous for 
honesty, sagacity, and humanity, and, above all, for 
justice. Our Presidents in particular have been such 
men as democracy should breed, and some of them such 
men as humanity has seldom bred. We are a proud 
nation, and justly; and, looking to the future, beholding 
these things multiplied million-fold in the lives of the 
children of the land to be, we may well humbly own God's 
bounty which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits 
of democracy in the new ages of a humaner world. 

It will be plain to those who have read what has else- 
where been said of the ideal life, that democracy is for 
the nation a true embodiment of that life, and wears its 
characteristics upon its sleeve. In it the individual 
mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, 
and mankind itself sums the totality of individual good 
in a well-night perfect way. In it there is the slow em- 
bodiment of a future nobly conceived and brought into 
existence on an ideal basis of the best that is, from age 
to age, in man's power. It includes the universal wisdom, 
the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which 



172 HEART OF MAN 

men climb, and here manhood climbs. It knows no 
limit; it rejects no man who wears the form Christ wore; 
it receives all into its benediction. Through democracy, 
more readily and more plainly than through any other 
system of government or conception of man's nature and 
destiny, the best of men may blend with his race, and 
store in their common life the energies of his own soul, 
looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, 
as elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; 
and they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to man- 
kind, which is by creation equal in destiny, and in fact 
equal in the larger part of human nature, however ob- 
structed by time and circumstance, are foolish with- 
drawers from the ways of life. On the battle-field or in 
the Senate, or in the humblest cabin of the West, to lead 
an American life is to join heart and soul in this cause. 



THE RIDE 

Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the 
child's element, though he sees it not; for, year by year, 
acquiring the solid and palpable, the visible and audi- 
ble, the things of mortal life, he lives in horizons of the 
senses, and though grown a youth he still looks intellec- 
tually for things definite and clear. Education in general 
through its whole period induces the contempt of all 
else, impressing almost universally the positive element 
in life, whose realm in early years at least is sensual. 
So it was with me: the mind's eye saw all that was or 
might be in an atmosphere of skepticism, as my bodily 
eye beheld the world washed in color. Yet the habitual 
sense of mystery in man's life is a measure of wisdom 
in the man; and, at last, if the mind be open and turn 
upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage's knowledge 
or the poet's emotion or such common experience of the 
world as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally 
in the globed sky or the unlighted spirit. 

I well remember the very moment when a poetical 
experience precipitated this conviction out of moods long 
familiar, but obscurely felt and deeply distrusted. I was 
born and bred by the sea; its mystery had passed into 
my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at 
least, not to be separated from the moods of my own 
spirit. But on my first Italian voyage, day by day we 
rolled upon the tremendous billows of a stormy sea, and 

173 



174 HEART OF MAN 

all was strange and solemn — the illimitable tossing of 3l 
wave-world, darkening night after night through weird 
sunsets of a spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments 
that were doorways of a new earth and new heavens; 
and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck in this 
water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southern- 
most of the Azores, and gradually we drew near to it. 
I shall never forget the strangeness of that sight — that 
solitary island under the sunlit shower of early morning; 
it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and 
wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with 
many near and distant rainbows that shone and faded 
and came again as we steamed through them, and the 
white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were the 
whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed by, 
and I could not have told what it was in that island scene 
which had so arrested me. But when, some days after- 
ward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked upon the mag- 
nificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, 
again I felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the 
mystery of the land. It was altogether a discovery, a 
direct perception, a new sense of the natural world. 
Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had 
dreamed that on the further side I should find the "far 
west" that had fled before me beyond the river, the 
prairies, and the plains; but there was no such mystery 
in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted me 
coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. 
Since that morning in the Straits, every horizon has been 
a mystery to me, to the spirit no less than to the eye; 
and truths have come to me like that lone island em- 
bosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain 
barriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, 



THE RIDE 175 

untraveled, of a land men yet might tread as common 
ground. 

"A poet's mood" — I know what once I should have 
said. But mystery I then accepted as the only comple- 
ment, the encompassment, of what we know of our life. 
In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and 
I have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, 
however, stands out in my memory even more intensely 
than those I have made bold to mention — one experi- 
ence that brought me near to my mother earth, as that 
out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, 
and made these things seem as natural as to draw my 
breath from the sister element of air. I had returned 
to the West; and while there, wandering in various places, 
I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some 
few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the 
mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, 
had halted its great steel branch — sinking like a thunder- 
bolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affect- 
ing me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There 
a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely strug- 
gle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civili- 
zation as made my heart fail at first sight, though not 
unused to the meagerness, crudity, and hardness of such 
a place; but there I had come to take the warm wel- 
come of his hands and look once more into his face before 
time should part us. He flung his arms about me, with 
a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing 
lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for 
one instant of golden time. 

But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of 
some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found 
it was into the frontier of our western border. A herd 



176 HEART OF MAN 

of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I 
went to see them — wild animals, beautiful in their wild- 
ness, who had never know bit or spur; they were lariated 
and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and 
then led and pulled away to man's life. It was a typical 
scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and 
startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose 
resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace — athletes 
in the grain — with the gray, close garb for use, the 
cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, 
the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the 
hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the 
master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a 
struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against 
frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our 
spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at 
least that every moment my friend's eye was on me, and 
he kept saying, "They're wild, mind!" The next morn- 
ing in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove 
out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due 
north to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience 
of the vast American land that bore us both, and made us, 
despite the thousands of miles that stretched between 
ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain — broth- 
ers and friends. 

Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf 
of my book of memory! for my eyes were fascinated 
with the land, in the high blowing August wind, full of 
coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my 
nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, 
illimitable, ran the brown road, like a plowed ribbon 
of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer 
and prospector had gone before, and now the farmer was 



THE RIDE 177 

thinly settling — the new America growing up before my 
eyes! and him only by me to make me not a stranger 
there, with talk of absent friends and old times, though 
scarce the long age of a college course had gone by — 
talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, 
problems such as the young talk of together and keep 
their secret, learning life — the troubles of the heart of 
youth. And if now I recur to some of the themes we 
touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments 
of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as 
they were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; 
for, as I write, I see them in that place, with that noble 
prospect, that high sky, and him beside me whose young 
listening yet seems to woo them from my breast. 

We mounted the five-mile ridge — and, "Poor Robin," 
he said, "what of him?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the 
Muses' graveyard," I laughed, "in the soft gray ashes 
of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before 
he tells the tale." "I loved his 'awakening/ " he replied, 
"and I have often thought of it by myself. And will 
nothing come of him now?" "Who can tell?" I said, 
looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses must care 
for their own. That 'awakening/ " I went on, after a 
moment of wondering why the distant stream of the 
valley was called "the Looking-glass," and learning only 
that such was its name, "was when after the bookish 
torpor of his mind — you remember he called books his 
opiates — he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel 
of human service come back on him like a flood. It 
was the growing consciousness of how little of life is 
our own. Youth takes life for granted; the hand that 
smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs 
that brought new blossoms to his cheeks, the common 



178 HEART OF MAN 

words that martyr and patriot have died to form on 
childish lips, and make them native there with life's 
first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and 
bring no obligation. Our life from babyhood is only one 
long lesson in indebtedness; and we best learn what we 
have received by what we give. This was dawning on 
my hero then. I recall how he ran the new passion. 
That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of 
the prairies, like the misted birches at home, under the 
heaven-wide warmth of April breathing with universal 
mildness through the softened air — why, you can re- 
member the very day," I said. "It was one — " "Yes, 
I can remember more than that/' he interrupted; "I 
know the words, or some of them; what you just said 
was the old voice — tang and color — Poor Robin's 
voice;" and he began, and I listened to the words, which 
had once been mine, and now were his. 

"By heaven, I never believed it. 'Clotho spins, 
Lachesis weaves, and Atropos cuts/ I said, 'and the poor 
illusion vanishes; the loud laughter, the fierce wailing, 
die on pale lips; the foolish and the wise, the merciful 
and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the idlers 
in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the 
heart of Mary Mother and of Mary Magdalen are one 
dust.* Duly in those years the sun rose to cheer me; the 
breath of the free winds was in my nostrils; the grass 
made my pathways soft to my feet. Spring with its 
blossomed fruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, glad- 
dened me; the flame of autumn was my torch of memory, 
and winter lighted my lamp of solitude. Men tilled the 
fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, and 
so far as in them was power and in me was need, 



THE RIDE 179 

brought to my doors sustenance for the body and what- 
soever of divine truth was theirs for my soul. Women 
ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among 
my fellows gave me their souls in keeping. How true 
is that which my friend said to the poor boy-murderer 
condemned to die — 'I tell you, you cannot escape the 
mercy of God'; and tears coursed down the imbruted face, 
and once more the human soul, that the ministers of 
God could not reach, shone in its tabernacle. Now the 
butterfly has flown in at the tavern-window, and re- 
buked me. I go out, and on the broad earth the warm 
sun shines; the spring moves throughout our northern 
globe as when first man looked upon it; the seasons keep 
their word; the birds know their pathways through the 
air; the animals feed and multiply; the succession of day 
and night has no shadow of turning; the stars keep their 
order in the blue depths of infinite space; Sirius has not 
swerved from his course, nor Aldebaran flamed beyond 
his sphere; nature puts forth her strength in all the vast 
compass of her domain, and is manifest in life that con- 
tinues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, height- 
ened to fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of 
man. Wiser were the ascetics whom I used to scorn; 
they made themselves ascetics of the body, but I have 
been an ascetic of the soul." 

"Eccola!" I said, "was it like that? But a heady 
rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as 
many a Victorian page we have read together testifies. 
The style tames with the spirit; and wild blood is not the 
worst of faults in poets or boys. But I will change old 
coin for the new mintage with you, if you like, and it 
is not so very different. There is a good stretch ahead, 



180 HEART OF MAN 

and the ponies never seem to misbehave both at once." 
In fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy the broad, 
open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson of 
civilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, 
while one or the other of them would from time to time 
fling back his heels and prepare to resist, the other 
dragged him into the course with the steady pace, and, 
under hand and voice, they kept going in a much less 
adventurous way than I had anticipated. And so I read 
a page or two from the small blank-book in which I used 
to write, saying only, by way of preface, that the April 
morning my friend so well remembered marked the time 
when I began that direct appeal to life of which these 
notes were the first-fruits. 

The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost be- 
hind its bluffs to the west as we turned inland, though 
we still rose with the slope of the valley; and now on 
higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep, 
but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me 
in prairie regions, the rolling of the country being in 
great swells; and this slight touch of strangeness, this 
accentuation of the motionless lines of height and hol- 
low, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was what 
first gave that life to the soil, the sense of a presence 
in the earth itself, which was felt at a later time. Then 
I saw only the outspread region, with here and there a 
gleam of the grain on side-hills and far-curved embra- 
sures of the folded slopes, or great stands of Indian corn, 
acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling any- 
where; the loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primi- 
tiveness of it, were the elements I remember; and the 
wind, and the unclouded great expanse of the blue upper 
sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color over the 



THE RIDE 181 

gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of 
brown road and soil. So, with pauses for common sights 
and things, and some word of comment and fuller state- 
ment and personal touches that do not matter now, I 
read my brief notes of life in its most sacred part. 

"The gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a 
baby's lips; the air asks no consent to fill the lungs, the 
heart beats, the senses awaken, the mind begins, and the 
first handwriting of life is a child's smile; but as boy- 
hood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more 
intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer 
values, life is not less entirely a gift. As well say a self- 
born as a self-made man. Nature does not intrust to 
us her bodily processes and functions, and the fountains 
of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define, 
without obligation to man's wisdom; body and soul alike 
are above his will — our garment of sense comes from 
no human loom, nor were the bones of the spirit fashioned 
by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth, too, 
bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to 
that law of grace that went forth with the creative word. 
Slow as men are to realize the fact and the magnitude 
of this great grant, and the supreme value of it as life 
itself in all its abundance of blessings, there comes a time 
to every generous and open heart when the youth is made 
aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him 
from the forms and forces of nature with benedictions 
of beauty and vigor; he knows, too, the cherishing of 
human service all about him in familiar love and the 
large brothering of man's general toil; he begins to see, 
shaping itself in him, the vast tradition of the past — its 
mighty sheltering of mankind in institution and doctrine 



1 82 HEART OF MAN 

and accepted hopes, its fostering agencies, its driving 
energies. What a breaking out there is then in him 
of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent 
life — filial love, patriotic duty, man's passion for hu- 
manity! It is then that he becomes a man. Strange 
would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should 
not, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good! 
"As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has 
established a direct relation with the Creator, did he 
but realize it — not in mere thought of some temporal 
creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning, but in 
immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps 
the universe in being, 

'Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above/ — 

felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, 
is his own. The extreme sense of this may take on the 
expression of the pantheistic mood as here in Shelley's 
words, without any logical irreverence: for pantheism is 
that great mood of the human spirit which it is, perma- 
nent, recurring in every age and race, as natural to Words- 
worth as to Shelley, because of the fundamental character 
of these facts and the inevitability of the knowledge of 
them. The most arrogant thought of man, since it identi- 
fies him with deity, it springs from that same sense of 
insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of 
religious life in all its forms. A mind deeply penetrated 
with the feeling that all we take and all we are, our joys 
and the might and grace of life in us, are the mere lend- 
ings of mortality like Lear's rags, may come to think 
man the passive receptacle of power, and the instru- 
ment scarce distinguishable from the hand that uses it; 



THE RIDE 183 

the thought is as nigh to St. Paul as to Plato. This inti- 
mate and infinite sense of obligation finds its highest 
expression, on the secular side, and takes on the touch 
of mystery, in those great men of action who have 
believed themselves in a special manner servants of God, 
and in great poets who found some consecration in their 
calling. They, more than other men, know how small 
is any personal part in our labors and our wages alike. 
But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and 
its instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live 
is to contract a greater debt in proportion to the great- 
ness of the life; it is greatest in the greatest. 

"This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who 
is most sensitive to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick 
to love, who is most ardent in the world's service, feels 
most constantly this power which enfolds him in its 
hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should 
gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless 
good fail to become a part of the daily life of his spirit, 
deepening with every hour in which the value, the power 
and sweetness of life, is made more plain? Yet at the 
same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin- 
born with this thankfulness — the feeling of helplessness. 
Though the secret and inscrutable power, sustaining and 
feeding life, be truly felt — 

'Closer is He than breathing and nearer than 
hands and feet/ — 

though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes this 
natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who can free him- 
self from mortal fear, or dispense with human hope, how- 
ever firm and irremovable may be his confidence in the 
beneficent order of God? And especially in the more 



184 HEART OF MAN 

strenuous trials of later ages for Christian perfection in 
a world not Christian, and under the mysterious dis- 
pensation of nature, even the youth has lived little, and 
that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, 
guidance, protection. Dependent as he feels himself to 
be for all he is and all he may become, the means 
of help — self-help even — and the law of it must be 
from that same power, whose efficient working he has 
recognized with a thankful heart. Where else shall 
he look except to that experience of exaltation dur- 
ing whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for 
the future, a reasonable belief in Providence, and a 
humble readiness to accept the partial ills of life? In 
life's valleys, then, as on its summits, in the darkness 
as in the light, he may retain that once confided trust; 
not that he looks for miracle, or any specific and par- 
ticularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course 
of things he believes in the natural alliance of that arm 
of infinite power with himself. In depression, in trouble, 
in struggle, such as all life exhibits, he will be no more 
solitary than in his hours of blessing. Thus, through 
helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation with 
God, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the 
cry for aid as in the offering of thanks. The gratitude 
of the soul may be likened to that morning prayer of 
the race which was little more than praise with uplifted 
hands; the helplessness of man is rather the evening 
prayer of the Christian age, which with bowed head im- 
plores the grace of God to shield him through the night. 
These two, in all times, among all races, under ten thou- 
sand divinities, have been the voice of the heart. 

"There is a third mood of direct experience by which 
one approaches the religious life. Surely no man in our 



THE RIDE 185 

civilization can grow far in years without finding out 
that, in the effort to live a life obeying his desires and 
worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ's 
commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, 
so far as they relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled 
in himself day by day; he can escape neither the ideal 
that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ in respect to 
the working of that ideal on others and within him- 
self. He perceives the evil of the world, and desires to 
share in its redemption; its sufferings, and would remove 
them; its injustice, and would abolish it. He is, by the 
mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a human- 
itarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he 
be sincere, he has not lived long before he knows in him- 
self such default of duty that he recognizes it as the 
soul's betrayal; its times and occasions, its degrees of 
responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or of 
an evil will, its greater or less offense, are indifferent 
matters; for, as it is the man of perfect honor who feels 
a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy 
of repentance is keenest in the purest souls. It is death 
that is dull, it is life that is quick. It may well be, 
in the world's history in our time, that the suffering 
caused in the good by slight defections from virtue far 
overbalances the general remorse felt for definite and 
habitual crime. Thus none — those least who are most 
hearts of conscience — escapes this emotion, known in 
the language of religion as conviction of sin. It is the 
earliest moral crisis of the soul; it is widely felt — such 
is the nature and such the circumstances of men; and, as 
a man meets it in that hour, as he then begins to form 
the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so 
runs his life to the end save for some great change. If 



1 86 HEART OF MAN 

then some restoring power enters in, some saving force, 
whether it be from the memory and words of Christ, or 
from the example of those lives that were lived in the 
spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more tender 
affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope 
of struggle — in whatever way that healing comes, it 
is well; and, just as the man of honest mind has recog- 
nized the identity of his virtue with Christ's rule, and 
has verified in practice the wisdom of its original state- 
ment, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its 
method, is what has been known on the lips of saint and 
sinner as the life of the Spirit in man, and even more 
specially he cannot discriminate it from what the servants 
of Christ call the life of Christ in them. He has be- 
come more than a humanitarian through this experi- 
ence; he is now himself one of those whom in the mass 
he pities and would help; he has entered into that com- 
munion with his kind and kin which is the earthly seal 
of Christian faith. 

"Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to con- 
centrate attention upon the moral experience here de- 
scribed; it is but initial; and, though repeated, it remains 
only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is put forth 
through health, and its curative power is an incident and 
subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made mani- 
fest, in the main, in the joy of the soul in so far as 
it has been made whole. A narrow insistence on the 
fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both in one's own 
conscience and in his love for others. Sin is but a part 
of life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measure- 
less good achieved in those lines of human effort which 
have either never been deflected from right aims, or have 
been brought back to the paths of advance, which I 



THE RIDE 187 

believe to be the greater part, both in individual lives 
of noble intention, and in the Christian nations. Sin 
loses half its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of 
its terrors, if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter 
with controlling influence into personal life, and to what 
a degree ideal destinies are already incarnate in the 
spirit of great nations. 

"However this may be, I find on examination of man's 
common experience these three things, which establish, 
it seems to me, a direct relation between him and God: 
this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this 
noble practice, which is, historically, the Christian life, 
and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. They 
are simple elements: a faith in God's being which has 
not cared further to define the modes of that being; a 
hope which has not grown to specify even a Resurrection; 
a love that has not concentrated itself through limitation 
upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, 
inchoate as they are, they remain faith, hope, love — these 
three. Are they not sufficient to be the beginnings of 
the religious life in the young? To theological learning, 
traditional creeds, and conventional worship they may 
seem primitive, slight in substance, meager in apparel; 
but one who is seeking, not things to believe, but things 
to live, desires the elementary. In setting forth first 
principles, the elaboration of a more highly organized 
knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, an 
impediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to 
touch and handle the essential matter ; and for this reason 
a teacher dispenses with much in his exposition, just 
as in talking to a child a grown man abandons nine-tenths 
of his vocabulary. In the same way, learning as a child, 
seeking in the life of the soul with God what is normal, 



1 88 HEART OF MAN 

vital, and universal, the beginner need not feel poor and 
balked, because he does not avail himself as yet of re- 
sources that belong to length of life, breadth of scholar- 
ship, intellectual power, the saint's ardor, the seer's in- 
sight. 

"The spiritual life here denned, elementary as it is, 
appears inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. 
Why should this be surprising? Surely if there be a 
revelation of the divine at all, it must be one independ- 
ent of external things; one that comes to all by virtue 
of their human nature; one that is direct, and not 
mediately given through others. Faith that is vital 
is not the fruit of things told of, but of things experi- 
enced. It follows that religion may be essentially free 
from any admixture of the past in its communication to 
the soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time 
now disputable, or on books of a far-off and now alien 
age. These things are the tradition and history of the 
spiritual life, but not the life. To the mass of men 
religion derived from such sources would be a belief in 
other men's experience, and for most of them would rest 
on proofs they cannot scrutinize. It would be a reli- 
gion of authority, not of personal and intimate convic- 
tion. Just as creation may be felt, not as some far-off 
event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present 
reality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of 
God as when they spoke to the Psalmist? and has the 
light that lighteth every man who is born into the world 
ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle was lit 
on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and 
mercy be an everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save 
in the life itself, then only is that direct relation of man 
with God, this vital certainty in living truth — living in 
us — this personal religion, possible. 



THE RIDE 189 

"What has reform in religion ever been other than the 
demolition of the interfering barriers, the deposit of the 
past, between man and God? The theory of the office 
of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man's need 
of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in 
all ages, affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but 
the heart of man in his loneliness, seeking God face to 
face? what is its inconclasm of image and altar, of prayer- 
book and ritual, of the Councils and the Fathers, but 
the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul 
by virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audi- 
ence, a son's right of presence with his father, and believes 
that such is God's way with his own? This immediacy 
of the religious life, being once accepted as the sub- 
stance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater 
mass of that burden in which skepticism thrives and 
labors. The theories of the past respecting God's gov- 
ernment, no longer possible in a humaner and Christian- 
ized age, the impaired genuineness of the Scriptures and 
all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great 
doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. 
A man may approach divine truth without them. Simple 
and bare as the spiritual life here presented is, it is 
not open to such skeptical attack, being the fundamental 
revelation of God bound up in the very nature of man 
which has been recognized at so many critical times, 
in so many places and ages, as the inward light. We 
may safely leave dogma and historical criticism and sci- 
entific discovery on one side; it is not in them that man 
finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions 
as they naturally arise under the influence of life. 

"This view is supported rather than weakened by such 



190 HEART OF MAN 

records of the spiritual life in man as we possess. Man's 
nature is one; and, just as it is interpreted and illuminated 
by the poets from whom we derive direction in our 
general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by saintly 
men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul's 
life with God. Our nature is one with theirs; but as 
there are differences in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and 
fates of all men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their 
growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of such 
intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so de- 
veloped in religious experience, through instinct, circum- 
stance, and power, that they can aid us by the example 
and precept of their lives. To them belongs a respect 
similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. Yet it is 
because they tell us what they have seen and touched, 
not what they have heard — what they have lived and 
shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, 
that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, 
St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas a. Kempis, and many a 
humbler name whose life's story has come into our hands; 
such were the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is 
the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, funda- 
mental, that preserves their influence in other lives. 
They help us by opening and directing the spiritual 
powers we have in common; and beyond our own experi- 
ence v/e believe in their counsels as leading to what we 
in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they fol- 
lowed. It is not what they believed of God, but what 
God accomplished in them, that holds our attention; and 
we interpret it only by what ourselves have known of 
his dealing with us. It is life, and the revelation of God 
there contained, that in others or ourselves is the root 
of the matter — God in us. This is the corner stone." 



THE RIDE 191 

The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased 
talking of these matters and saw in a lowland before us 
a farmhouse, where we stopped. It was a humble dwell- 
ing — almost the humblest — partly built of sod, with 
a barn near by, and nothing to distinguish it except 
the sign, "Post Office," which showed it was the center 
of this neighborhood, if "the blank miles round about" 
could be so called. We were made welcome, and, the 
ponies being fed and cared for, we sat down with the 
farmer and his wife and the small brood of young chil- 
dren, sharing their noonday meal. It was a rude table 
and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have 
been at such a board, taking a stranger's portion, but 
not like a stranger. It was to be near the common lot, 
and the sense of it was as primitive as the smell of the 
upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness of 
life in it. Going out, I lay down on the ground and 
talked with the little boy, some ten years old, to whom 
our coming was evidently an event of importance; and 
I remember asking him if he ever saw a city. He had 

been once, he said, to , — the hamlet, as I thought 

it, which we had just left — with his father in the farm- 
wagon. That was his idea of the magnificence of cities. 
I could not but look at him curiously. Here was the 
creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look 
of man's world than any one I had ever encountered. 
To him this overstretching silent sky, this vacant rolling 
reach of earth, and home, were all of life. What a waif 
of existence! — but the ponies being ready, we said our 
good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still north- 
ward. We talked for a while in that spacious atmos- 
phere — the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, 
lightly humorous, too, which we always had together; 



192 HEART OF MAN 

but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my 
mind as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated be- 
ing whom my notes had described, and knowing that I 
had told but half my story and that my friend would like 
the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious things, 
saying — and there was nothing surprising in such a 
change with us — " After all, you know, we can't live 
to ourselves alone or by ourselves. How to enter life 
and be one with other men, how to be the child of society, 
and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escape from 
the solitude of private life is the most important thing 
for men of lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation 
breeds. There is more of it, if you will listen again;" 
and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and the youthful 
happiness in the new things of life for us — new as if 
they had not been lived a thousand years before — lis- 
tened like a child to a story, grave as the matter was, 
which I read again from the memoranda I had made, 
after that April morning, year by year. 

"Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; 
it becomes in men a sentiment of the soul. An obscure 
melancholy, the pathos of human fate, mingles with this 
instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea, the sub- 
limity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the 
beautiful and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind 
does not distinguish from eternal things, and has ever 
invested with sacred awe. It is the sense of our mor- 
tality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity 
merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods 
are too impalpable, and, contemplating their vastness, 
amazement dissipates our faculties. Rather some sign 
of human occupancy, turning the desert into a neglected 



THE RIDE 193 

garden, is necessary to give emotional color and the sub- 
stance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows 
a writing beyond nature's can add what centuries could 
not give, and makes a rock a monument. The Medi- 
terranean islet is older for the pirate tower that caps 
it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, 
makes England ancestral soil. Nor is it only such 
landmarks of time that bring this obscure awe; occupa- 
tions, especially, awake it, and customary ceremonies, and 
all that enters into the external tradition of life, handed 
down from generation to generation. On the Western 
prairies I have felt rather the permanence of human toil 
than the newness of the land. 

"The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on 
the seeming agelessness of nature, is a meditation on 
death, deep-set far below thought. We behold the sen- 
sible conquests of death, and the sight is so habitual, and 
remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in 
the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, 
sentiment, imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyra- 
mids then seem fossils of mankind; Stonehenge, Indian 
mounds, and desolate cities are like broken anchors 
caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, 
lost relics of their human charge long vanished away. 
Startling it is, when the finger of time has touched what 
we thought living, and we find in some solitary place the 
face of stone. I learned this lesson on the low marshes 
of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thou- 
sands of white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, 
from whose ruined sides Christianity, in the face and 
figure it wore before it put on the form and garb of a 
world-wide religion, looked down on me with the un- 
known eyes of an alien and Oriental faith. 'Stranger, 



194 HEART OF MAN 

why lingerest thou in this broken tomb/ I seemed to 
hear from silent voices in that death of time; and still, 
when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christen- 
dom, they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, 
but are pilgrims to the low marshes, the white water 
lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin that even the sea has 
long abandoned. 

"The Mother-Church? — is then this personal religious 
life only a state of orphanage? Because true life neces- 
sarily begins in the independent self, must it continue 
without the sheltering of the traditional past, the in- 
structed guidance of elder wisdom, and man's joint life 
in common which by association so enlarges and fortifies 
the individual good? Why should one not behave with 
respect to religion as he does in other parts of life? It 
is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond 
ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a 
more efficient will enacting our own choice. To obey 
by force is a childish or a slavish act, but intelligently 
and willingly to accept authority within just limits is 
the reasonable and practical act of a free man in society; 
the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment 
of intellectual majority. Authority, in all its modes, is 
the bond of the commonwealth; until the youth compre- 
hends it he is a ward; thereafter he is either a rebel 
or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largest 
measure of freedom society has ever known, there is 
little fear lest the principle of authority should prove 
a dangerous element. The right of private judgment, 
which is, I believe, the vital principle of the intellectual 
life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who 
lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education 
which would repeat in the child the history of the race, 



THE RIDE 195 

we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer 
and catechism before we would remove all questions to 
the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a 
tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, 
we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there. 
The treasure doors of our fathers' inheritance are thrown 
open to us ; but we will weigh each gold piece with balance 
and scale. All that libraries contain, all that institu- 
tions embody, all that practice of life which, in its inno- 
cence, mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, 
shall be certified by our scrutiny. So in youth we say, 
and what results? What do the best become? Incapa- 
bles, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to 
the intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, ex- 
tending till it fills heaven and earth. We no longer 
discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an 
attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases 
in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense 
of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. 
Pilate's question 'What is truth?' ends all. 

"This is the extreme penalty of the heroic skeptical 
resolve in strong and constant minds; commonly those 
who would measure man's large scope by the gage of 
their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyn- 
crasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social 
schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, 
for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels 
them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if 
it were real, corrects their original method of independ- 
ence. They find that to use authority is the better part 
of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical 
statecraft; and they learn the reasonable share of the 
principle of authority in life. They accept, for example, 



iq6 HEART OF MAN 

the testimony of others in matters of fact, and their 
mental results in those subjects with which such men 
are conversant, on the ground of a just faith in average 
human capacity in its own sphere; and, in particular, they 
accept provisional opinions, especially such as are alleged 
to be verifiable in action, and they put them to the test. 
This is our habit in all parts of secular life — in scholar- 
ship and in practical affairs. 'If any man will do His 
will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God/ 
is only a special instance of this law of temporary accep- 
tance and experiment in all life. It is a reasonable com- 
mand. The confusion of human opinion largely arises 
from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, 
owing to the deficient culture or opportunity of those 
who hold it; and the persistency with which such opinion 
is argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of many 
of the permanent differences that array men in opposi- 
tion. The event would dispense with the argument; but 
in common life, which knows far more of the world than 
it has in its own laboratory, much lies beyond the reach 
of such real solution. It is the distinction of vital reli- 
gious truth that it is not so withdrawn from true proof, 
but is near at hand in the daily life open to all. 

"Such authority, then, as is commonly granted in 
science, politics, or commerce to the past results and 
expectations of men bringing human life in these provinces 
down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, but 
as an incomplete thing, into the hands of our genera- 
tion, we may yield also in religion. The lives of the 
saints and all those who in history have illustrated the 
methods and results of piety, their convictions, specu- 
lations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, 
compose a great volume of instruction, illustration, and 



THE RIDE 197 

education of the religious life. It is folly to ignore this, 
as it would be to ignore the alphabet of letters, the 
Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for, as these are 
the monuments of past achievement and an advantage 
we have at our start over savage man, so in religion 
there are as well established results of life already lived. 
Though the religious life be personal, it is not more 
so than all life of thought and emotion; and in it we 
do not begin at the beginning of time any more than 
in other parts of life. We begin with an inheritance 
of many experiments hitherto, of many methods, of a 
whole race-history of partial error, partial truth; and we 
take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with 
the respect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort 
and trial, their convictions; and the youth who does not 
feel their impressiveness as enforcing his responsibility 
has as nascent a life in religion as he would have, in 
the similar case, in learning or in citizenship. 

"The question of authority in the religious life, how- 
ever, is more specific than this, and is not to be met 
by an admission of the general respect due to the 
human past and its choicer spirits, and our dependence 
thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses, direc- 
tion, and the confirmation of our experience. It is or- 
ganized religion that here makes its claim to fealty, as 
organized liberty, organized justice do, in man's com- 
munal life. There is a joint and general consent in the 
masses of men with similar experience united into the 
Church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar 
to that of such masses united into a government with 
respect to secular things. The history of the Church 
with its embodied dogmas — the past of Christendom 
— contains that consent; and the Church founds its 



198 HEART OF MAN 

claim to veneration on this broad accumulation of ex- 
perience, so gathered from all ages and all conditions 
of men as to have lost all traces of individuality and 
become the conviction of mankind to a degree that no 
free constitution and no legal code can claim. To sub- 
stitute the simple faith of the young heart, however 
immediate, in the place of this hoary and command- 
ing tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both 
arrogance and folly; to stand apart from it, though 
willing to be taught within the free exercise of our own 
faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary, for our own 
self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the Church 
definitely, not as a part of the common mass of race- 
tradition in a diffused state like philosophy, but as an 
institution like the Throne or the Parliament. 

"But may it not be pleaded that, however slight by 
comparison personal life may seem, yet if it be true, 
the Church must include this in its own mighty sum; 
and that what the Church adds to define, expand, and 
elevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in 
spiritual things, not to those beginnings which only are 
here spoken of? And in defense of private view and 
hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organized social 
life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past 
of Christendom, great as it is in mental force, moral 
ardor, and spiritual insight, and illustrious with tri- 
umphs over evil in man and in society, and shining 
always with the leading of a great light, is yet a human 
past, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? Is 
its historic life, with all its accumulation of creed and 
custom, not a process of Christianization, in which much 
has been sloughed off at every new birth of the world? 
In reading the Fathers we come on states of mind and 



THE RIDE 199 

forms of emotion due to transitory influences and sur- 
roundings; and in the history of the Church, we come 
upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of work and aims 
of effort, which were of contemporary validity only. 
Such are no longer rational or possible; they have passed 
out of life, belonging to that body of man which is 
forever dying, not to the spirit that is forever growing; 
and, too, as all men and bodies of men share in imper- 
fection, we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, 
upon passions, persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and 
failure, necessarily to be accounted as a portion of the 
admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, in the whole of 
man's historic life. In view of these obvious facts, and 
also of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies 
as are here spoken of in their total mass as the Church, 
and of their emphasis upon such particularities, is not 
an attitude of reserve justifiable in a young and con- 
scientious heart? It may seem to be partial skepticism, 
especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion 
of this embodied past becomes clearer in the growth of 
the mind's information and the strengthening of moral 
judgment in a rightful independence. But if much must 
be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the more 
in proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption. 
Let us own, then, and reverence the great tradition 
of the Church; but he has feebly grasped the idea 
of Christ leavening the world, and has read little in the 
records of pious ages even, who does not know that 
even in the Church it is needful to sift truth from false- 
hood, dead from living truth. 

"If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such 
a use of reason as we make in regard to all other human 
institutions, viewing them historically with reference to 



200 HEART OF MAN 

their constant service to mankind and their particular 
adaption to a changing social state; if, as was the case 
with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the 
Church proclaims a commission not subject to human 
control, by virtue of which it would impose creed and 
ritual, and assumes those great offices, reserved in Puri- 
tan thought to God only — then does it not usurp the 
function of the soul itself, suppress the personal reve- 
lation of the divine by taking from the soul the seals of 
original sovereignty, remove God to the first year of 
our era, relying on his mediate revelation in time, and 
thus take from common man the evidence of religion 
and therewith its certainty, and in general substitute 
faith in things for the vital faith? If the voice of the 
Church is to find only its own echo in the inner voice 
of life, if its evidences of religion involve more than 
is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, 
if its rites have any other reality than that of the heart 
which expresses itself in them and so gives them life 
and significance, then its authority is external wholly 
and has nothing in common with that authority which 
free men erect over themselves because it is them- 
selves embodied in an outward principle. If personal- 
ity has any place in the soul, if the soul has any original 
office, then the authority that religion as an organic 
social form may take on must lie within limits that 
reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an 
unborrowed radiance, and to all men its possession, 
simple or learned, lay or cleric, through their common 
experience and ordinary faculties in the normal course 
of life. Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience 
cannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true 
available test of it, the underlying basis of it as we build 



THE RIDE 201 

the temple of God's presence within us, ana, as I have 
called it, the vitality of the whole matter. 

"Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier 
argument, what, under such reserves of the great prin- 
ciples of liberty, democracy, and justice in which we 
are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of 
the value of the personal soul in all men — what to us 
is the office of the Church? In theology it defines a 
philosophy which, though an interpretation of divine 
truth, takes its place in the intellectual scheme of theory 
like other human philosophies, and has a similar value, 
differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which 
is the most mysterious known to thought. In its specific 
rites it dignifies the great moments of life — birth, mar- 
riage, and death — with its solemn sanctions; and in 
its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms in 
which religious emotion finds noble and tender expres- 
sion; especially it enables masses of men to unite in one 
great act of the heart with the impressiveness that belongs 
to the act of a community, and to make that act, though 
emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole 
in manifestation; and it does this habitually in the life 
of its least groups by Sabbath observances, and in the 
life of nations by public thanksgivings, and in the life 
of entire Christendom by its general feasts of Christmas 
and Easter, and, though within narrower limits, by its 
seasons of fasting and prayer. In its administration it 
facilitates its daily work among men. The Church is 
thus a mighty organizer of thought in theology, of the 
forms of emotion in its ritual, and of practical action 
in its executive. Its doctrines, however conflicting in 
various divisions of the whole vast body, are the result 
of profound, conscientious, and long-continued thought 



202 HEART OF MAN 

among its successive synods, which are the custodians 
of creeds as senates are of constitutions, and whose 
affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in 
their own speculative sphere as these possess in the 
province of political thought age after age. Its counsels 
are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge of human na- 
ture. Its joys and consolations are the most precious 
inheritance of the heart of man. Its saints open our 
pathways, and go before, following in the ways of the 
spirit. Its doors concentrate within their shelter the 
general faith, and give it there a home. Its table is 
spread for all men. I do not speak of the Church 
Invisible, but mean to embrace with this catholicity of 
statement all organizations, howsoever divided, which 
own Christ as their Head. Temple, cathedral, and 
chapel have each their daily use to those who gather 
there with Christian hearts; each is a living fountain to 
its own fold. The village spire, wherever it rises on 
American or English ground, bespeaks an association of 
families who find in this bond an inward companionship 
and outward expression of it in a public habit con- 
tinuing from the fathers down, sanctified by the mem- 
ories of generations gone, and tender with the hope of 
the generation to come; and this is of measureless good 
within such families for young and old alike. It be- 
speaks also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, 
friendly, and searching, and growing more and more un- 
confined ; it bespeaks a rock of public mortality deep-set 
in the foundations of the state. 

"It is true that in uniting with such a Church, under 
the specific conditions natural to both temperament and 
residence, a man yields something of private right, and 
sacrifices in a greater or less degree his personality; but 



THE RIDE 203 

this is the common condition of all social cooperation, 
whether in party action or any union to a common end. 
The compromise, involved in any platform of principles, 
tolerates essential differences in important matters, but 
matters not then important in view of what is to be 
gained in the main. The advantages of an organized 
religious life are too plain to be ignored; it is reasonable 
to go to the very verge in order to avail of them, both 
for a man's self and for his efficiency in society, just as 
it is to unite with a general party in the state, and 
serve it in local primaries, for the ends of citizenship; 
such means of help and opportunities of accomplishment 
are not to be lightly neglected. Happy is he who, 
christened at the font, naturally accepts the duties de- 
volved upon him, and stands in his parents' place; and 
fortunate I count the youth who, without stress and 
trouble, undertakes in his turn his father's part. But 
some there are, born of that resolute manliness of the 
fathers, which is finer than tempered steel, and of the 
conscience of the mothers which is more sensitive than 
the bare nerve — the very flower of the Puritan tradi- 
tion, and my heart goes out to them. And if there be 
a youth in our days who feels hesitancy in such an early 
surrender into the bosom of a Church, however broadly 
inclusive of firm consciences, strong heads, and free 
hearts; if primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone and 
blood and is there the large reserve of liberty natural 
to the American heart; if the spirit is so living in him 
that he dispenses with the form, which to those of less 
strenuous strain is rather a support; if truth is so pre- 
cious to him that he will not subscribe to more or less 
than he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements 
speculative and uncertain elements, traditional error, 



204 HEART OF MAN 

and all that body of rejected doctrine which, though he 
himself be free from it, must yet be slowly uprooted from 
the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that 
his native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in 
this most private of life as to make it here something 
between God and him only; if his heart of charity and 
hand of friendship find out his fellow-men with no in- 
tervention; if for these reasons, or any of them, or if 
from that modesty of nature, which is so much more 
common in American youth than is believed, he hesi- 
tates, out of pure awe of the responsibility before God 
and man which he incurs, to think himself worthy of 
such vows, such hopes, such duties — if in any way, 
being of noble nature, he keeps by himself — let him 
not think he thereby withdraws from the life of Christen- 
dom, nor that in the Church itself he may not still take 
some portion of its great good. So far as its authority 
is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the reli- 
gious life itself without regard to other ends and free 
from intellectual, historical, and governmental entangle- 
ments that are supplementary at most, he needs no 
formal act to be one with its spirit; and, however much 
he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains 
a Christian." 

There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The 
faint tracks in the soil had long ago disappeared, 
and we followed, as was natural, the draws between 
the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass 
had deepened till it was above the wheels and to the 
shoulders of the ponies. They did not mind; they were 
born to it. What solitude there was in it, as we pulled 
up and came to a stand! What wildness was there! 



THE RIDE 205 

Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun 
of lonely splendor, and green horizons, broken and nigh, 
of the waving prairie, whispering with the high wind — 
and no life but ours shut in among the group of low, 
close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earth 
seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like 
this, men lost had died and none knew it; half -uncon- 
sciously I found myself thinking of Childe Roland's 
Tower — 

"those two hills on the right 
Couched," — 

and the reality of crossing the prairies in old days came 
back on me. That halt in the cup of the hills was our 
limit; it was a moment of life, an arrival, an end. 

The sun was too low for further adventuring. We 
struck due west on as straight a course as the rugged 
country permitted, thinking to reach the Looking-glass 
creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back 
to mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a 
house in the distance to which we drove — a humble 
house, sod-built, like that we had made our nooning in. 
We drove to the door, and called; it was long before 
any answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, 
her face and figure the very expression of dulled toil, 
hard work, bodily despair. Alone on that prairie, one 
would have thought she would have welcomed a human 
countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we 
would be gone, and hardly answered to our question 
of the road. She was the type of the abandonment of 
human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, 
as I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman 
could come to be, by human life, like that. There was 



206 HEART OF MAN 

no one else in the house; and she shut the door upon 
us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as if we, 
and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence 
in that green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles 
on miles. I have often thought of her since, and what 
life was to her there, and found some image of other 
solitudes — and men and women in them — as expansive, 
as alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, 
grows dehumanized, and dies. 

We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what 
we had with us in case of famine, made our supper from 
biscuit and flask; and, before darkness fell, we struck 
the creek road, and turned southward — a splendor of 
late sunset gleaming over the untraveled w r estern bank, 
and dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star- 
dawning overhead; and on we drove, with a hard road 
under us, having far to go. At the first farmhouse we 
watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to 
our control, and who went as if they could not tire, 
steadily and evenly, under the same strong hand and 
kindly voice they had felt day-long. It was then I took 
the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, 
and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all 
day with wrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove 
down, and knew the moon was up by the changed 
heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of the 
creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the 
evening light, lay the long valley like a larger river. 
We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier air; and 
always as, when night comes, nature exercises some 
mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places, 
there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth — 
not earth as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and color 



THE RIDE 207 

and human kinship, but earth, the soil, the element, 
the globe. 

This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it 
before he spoke after a long pause over the briar pipes 
that had comraded our talk since morning. "I can't talk 
of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an hour that 
you have been years in thinking; but that is what you 
are to us." I say the things he said, for I cannot other- 
wise give his way, and that trust of love in which these 
thoughts were born on my lips; all those years, in many 
a distant place, I had thought for him almost as much 
as for myself. "You knighted us," he said, "and we 
fight your cause," — not knowing that kingship, however 
great or humble, is but the lowly knights made one in 
him who by God's grace can speak the word. "I have 
no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. I 
expected it would be; but we used to speak of nature 
more than the soul, and of nature's being a guide. 
Poor Robin, I remember, began with that." "There is 
a sonnet of Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells 
another tale. But I did not learn it from him. And, 
besides, what else he has to say is not cheerful. Nothing 
is wise," I interjected, "that is not cheerful." 

But without repeating the wandering talk of reality 
with its changeful tones — and however serious the mat- 
ter might be it was never far from a touch of lightness 
shuttling in and out like sunshine — I told him, as we 
drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on 
his shoulder near me, how nature is antipodal to the 
soul; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, and 
cares not for the virtues we have erected, for authority 
and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing 
that is man's except the life of the body itself, the race- 



208 HEART OF MAN 

life, as if man were a chemical element or a wave-motion 
of ether that are parts of physics. "I convinced my- 
self," I said, "that the soul is not a term in the life of 
nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigor and 
to it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a 
preparation for immortality, whether immortality come 
or not. And I have sometimes thought," I continued, 
"that on the spiritual side an explanation of the in- 
equalities of human conditions, both past and present, 
may be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly 
and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and learned, 
life remains in all its conditions an opportunity to know 
God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an education 
of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, 
at least within Christian times, broadly speaking, and 
in more than one pagan civilization. Material success, 
fame, wealth, and power — birth even, with all it involves 
of opportunity and fate — are insignificant, if the souPs 
life is thus secured. I do not mean that such a thought 
clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but 
it suggests another view of the apparent injustice of 
the world in its most rigid forms. This, however, is a 
wandering thought. The great reversal of the law of 
nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she pro- 
ceeds by the selfish will of the strongest trampling out 
the weak, spiritual law requires the best to sacrifice itself 
for the least. Scientific ethics, which would chloroform 
the feeble, can never succeed until the race makes bold 
to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways 
of heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead 
soul. Such a code is at issue with true democracy, 
which requires that every soul, being equal in value 
in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit 



THE RJDE 209 

of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being 
in the hands of the secret power that ordained its exist- 
ence in the hour when nature was constituted to be its 
mode of birth, consciousness, and death. And if the 
choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our prac- 
tical faith that the service of the best, even to the point 
of death, is due to the least in the hope of bettering the 
lot of man. Hence, as we are willing that in communi- 
ties the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to 
the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some 
Hellenization of a Roman, some Romanizing of a bar- 
baric world; and to the extinction of aristocracies, if 
their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social 
goods they monopolized made common in a people; and 
to the falling of the flower of man's spirit everywhere, if 
its seeds be sown on all the winds of the future for the 
blessing of the world's fuller and more populous life. 
Such has been the history of our civilization, and still 
is, and must be till the whole earth's surface be con- 
quered for mankind, embodied in its highest ideals, per- 
sonal and social. This is not nature's way, who raises 
her trophy over the slain; our trophy is man's laurel 
upon our grave. So, everywhere except in the physical 
sphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, 
reverse nature's will. This superiority to nature, as it 
seems to me, this living in an element plainly antithetical 
to her sphere, is a sign of 'an ampler ether, a 
diviner air.' " 

So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were 
still driving down the dark valley, in deeper shadows, 
under higher bluffs, looking out on a leveled world west- 
ward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing mists and 
moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bank. 



210 HEART OF MAN 

We turned a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon 
shone out bright and clear, riding in heaven; and the 
southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for miles to 
our eyes. At the instant, while the ponies came back 
upon their haunches at the drop of the long descent 
ahead, we both cried out, "the Looking-glass!" There 
it was, about a mile away before and below us, as plain 
as a pikestaff — a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, 
smooth as the floor of cloud seen from above among 
mountains, silent, motionless — for all the world like an 
immense, spectral looking-glass, set there in the half- 
darkened waste. It was evidently what gave the name 
to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name 
elsewhere in the Western country, and I suppose the phe- 
nomenon is not uncommon. For an hour or more it re- 
mained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was an 
eerie thing — the earth-light of the moon on that side — 
I saw it all the time. 

"The difference you spoke of," I began, with my eyes 
upon that spectral pool, "is only that change which be- 
longs to life, dissolving like illusion, but not itself illu- 
sion. I am not aware of any break; it is the old life 
in a higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in the 
soul especially, seems less a state of being than a thing 
of transformation, whose successive shapes we wear; and 
so far as that change is self-determined," I continued, 
making almost an effort to think, so weird was that scene 
before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknowledge of itself 
in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which 
is not a conflict with the actual but a process out of it, 
conditioned in almost a Darwinian way on that brain- 
futuring which entered into the struggle for animal exist- 
ence even with such enormous modifying power. In our 



THE RIDE 211 

old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, 
we instinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, 
and then man seemed almost an after-thought of nature; 
but having been produced, late in her material history, 
and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from all 
else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby 
that speed which is so perplexing a contrast to the in- 
conceivable slowness of the orbing of stars and the build- 
ing of continents. He has used his powers of prescience 
for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might 
it happen that through his control of elemental forces 
and his acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach 
the point of applying prescience in nature's own material 
frame, and wield the world for the better accomplish- 
ment of her apparent ends — that, though unimagin- 
able now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind 
and half-chaotic motions — chaotic in intelligence, I 
mean, and to the moral reason. Unreal as such a 
thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature 
is discernible in the work of some impressionist land- 
scape painters, who present color and atmosphere and 
space without human intention, as a kind of artistry of 
science, having the same sort of elemental substance and 
interest that scientific truth has as an object of knowl- 
edge — a curious form of the beauty of truth." 

We spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before 
us lending atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and 
enforcing it like nature's comment. "But," I continued, 
"what I had in mind to say was concerning our dead 
selves. The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is true, 
and, once gone, life is death; and sometimes so much 
of it has been gathered to the past, such definite portions 
of it are laid away, that we can look, if we will, in the 



212 HEART OF MAN 

lake of memory on the faces of the dead selves which 
once we were." Instinctively we looked on the mystic 
glamor in the low valley, as on that Lake of the Dead 
Souls I spoke of. I went on after the natural pause — 
I could not help it — " 'I was a different man, then,' we 
say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often with 
better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. 
How old is the youth before he is aware of the fading 
away of vitality out of early beliefs? and then he feels 
the quick passing of the enthusiasms of opening life, as 
one cause after another, one hero, one poet, disclosing 
the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. As 
time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, 
one thing with another, and he discovers the incom- 
pleteness of single elements of ardor in the whole of life, 
and also the defects of wisdom, art, and action in those 
books and men that had won his full confidence and 
what he called perfect allegiance, there comes often a 
moment of pause, as if this growth had in it something 
irrational and derogatory. The thinkers w 7 hose words 
of light and leading were the precious truth itself, the 
poets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and 
others stand in their places, who better appeal to his 
older mind, his finer impulses, his sounder judgment; 
and what true validity can these last have in the end? 
After a decade he can almost see his youth as something 
dead, his early manhood as something that will die. The 
poet, especially, who gives expression to himself, and 
puts his life at its period into a book, feels, as each 
work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of a self 
that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so 
with the embodiment of life in action, the man looks 
back on past greatness, past romance; for all life, work- 



THE RIDE 213 

ing itself out — desire into achievement — dies to the 
man. Vital life lies always before. It is a strange 
thought that only by the death of what we now are, 
can we enter into our own hopes and victories; that it 
is by the slaying of the self which now is that the higher 
self takes life; that it is through such self-destruction 
that we live. The intermediate state seems a waste, 
and the knowledge that it is intermediate seems to im- 
pair its value; but this is the way ordained by which 
we must live, and such is life's magic that in each 
stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulness 
in itself. It is needful only, however much we outlive, 
to live more and better, and through all to remain true 
to the high causes, the faithful loves, the sacred impulses, 
that have given our imperfect life of the past whatever 
of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open into 
life. But," I ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the 
sweep of the dark slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves 
the mystic to inquire whence and whither, the wild shrub 
blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuse its 
beauty, and happy is he who can live without too much 
thought of life.'" 

The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek 
was only a common stream lit with the high moon, and 
bordered far off to the west with the low indistinguish- 
able country. We drove in silence down the valley along 
that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs 
on the left rose into immense slopes of rolling prairie, 
and magnified by the night atmosphere into majesty, 
heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood massive 
and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell 
on me and grew with strange insistence the sense of this 
everlasting mounded power of the earth, like the rise 



214 HEART OF MAN 

and subsidence of ocean in an element of slower and 
more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and 
lift, almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl 
of the planet through space. Deeper into the shadow 
we plunged with every echoing tread of the hoofs. The 
lair of some mysterious presence was about us — un- 
shaped, unlocalized, as in some place of antique awe 
before the time of temples or of gods. It seemed a cor- 
poreal thing. If I stretched out my hand I should touch 
it like the ground. It came out from all the black rifts, 
it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the 
chill air — it was an envelopment — it would be an en- 
gulfment — horse and man we were sinking in it. Then 
it was — most in all my days — that I felt dense mys- 
tery overwhelming me. "O infinite earth," I thought, 
"our unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!" — 
"What is it?" he said, feeling my wrist straighten where 
it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor, and the hand 
seeking him. Was* it a premonition? "Nothing," I 
answered, and did not tell him; but he began to cheer 
me with lighter talk, and win me back to the levels of 
life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the excite- 
ment of the ride died out, and an hour later, after mid- 
night, we drove into the silent town. We put the ponies 
up, praising them with hand and voice; and then he 
took both my hands in his and said, 'The truest thing 
you ever said was what you wrote me, 'We live each 
other's lives.' " That was his thanks. 

O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the 
green fold of that far prairie in his niche of earth! 
How often I see him as in our first days — the boy of 
seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his Thack- 
eray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself 






THE RIDE 215 

hour after hour; and many a prairie adventure, many 
happy days and fortunate moments come back, with the 
strength and bloom of youth, as I recall the manly figure, 
the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. 
Who of us knows what he is to another? He could not 
know how much his life entered into mine, and still 
enters. But he is dead; and I have set down these weak 
and stammering words of the life we began together, 
not for the strong and sure, but for those who, though 
true hearts, find it hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt 
themselves, in the hope that some younger comrade of 
life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find 
in them the dark leading of a hand. 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 



NOTE 

This essay was written as a preface to "One Hundred Books Famous 
in English Literature, with Facsimiles of the Title-Pages and an Intro- 
duction. The Grolier Club of the city of New York. MCMII." The 
list of books selected was the following: Chaucer, "Canterbury Tales"; 
Gower, "Confessio Amantis"; Malory, "Morte Arthure"; "The Booke 
of Common Praier"; Langland, "Vision of Pierce Plowman"; Holinshed, 
"Chronicles"; "A Myrrour for Magistrates"; Surrey, "Songes and Son- 
nettes"; Sackville, "Ferrex and Porrex"; Lylie, "Euphues"; Sidney, 
"Arcadia" ; Spenser, "Faerie Queene" ; Bacon, "Essaies" ; Hakluyt, "Navi- 
gations"; Chapman, "Homer"; Holy Bible; Jonson, "Workes"; Burton, 
"Anatomy of Melancholy"; Shakespeare, "Comedies, Histories and 
Tragedies"; Webster, "Duchesse of Malfy"; Massinger, "A New Way to 
Pay Old Debts"; Ford, "Broken Heart"; Marlowe, "Jew of Malta"; 
Herbert, "Temple"; Donne, "Poems"; Browne, "Religio Medici"; 
Waller, "Workes"; Beaumont and Fletcher, "Comedies and Tragedies"; 
Herrick, "Hesperides" ; Taylor, "Holy Living"; Walton, "Compleate 
Angler"; Butler, "Hudibras"; Milton, "Paradise Lost"; Bunyan, 
"Pilgrim's Progress" ; Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel" ; Locke, "Essay 
Concerning Humane Understanding"; Congreve, "Way of the World"; 
Clarendon, "History"; Steele, "Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, 
Esq."; Addison, "Spectator"; Defoe, "Robinson Crusoe"; Swift, "Trav- 
els into Several Remote Nations of the World"; Pope, "Essay on 
Man"; Butler, "Analogy"; Percy, "Reliques"; Collins, "Odes"; Richard- 
son, "Clarissa"; Fielding, "Tom Jones"; Gray, "Elegy"; Johnson, "Dic- 
tionary"; Franklin, "Poor Richard's Almanack"; Blackstone, "Com- 
mentaries"; Goldsmith, "Vicar of Wakefield"; Sterne, "Sentimental 
Journey"; "The Federalist"; Smollett, "Humphrey Clinker"; Smith, 
"Wealth of Nations"; Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire"; Sheridan, "School for Scandal"; Cowper, "Task"; Burns, 
"Poems"; White, "Natural History of Selborne"; Burke, "Reflections on 
the Revolution"; Paine, "Rights of Man"; Boswell, "Life of Samuel 
Johnson"; Wordsworth, "Lyrical Ballads"; Irving, "History of New 
York"; Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"; Austen, "Pride and 
Prejudice"; Coleridge, "Christabel"; Scott, "Ivanhoe"; Keats, Lamia"; 
Shelley, "Adonais"; Lamb, "Elia"; Pepys, "Memoirs"; Cooper, "Last of 
the Mohicans"; Landor, "Pericles and Aspasia"; Dickens, "Pickwick 
Papers" ; Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus" ; Emerson, "Nature" ; Prescott, "Con- 
quest of Peru"; Poe, "The Raven"; Bronte, "Jane Eyre"; Longfellow, 
"Evangeline"; Mrs. Browning, "Sonnets"; Lowell, "Biglow Papers"; 
Thackeray, "Vanity Fair"; Macaulay, "History of England"; Tennyson, 
"In Memoriam"; Hawthorne, "Scarlet Letter"; Stowe, "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin"; Ruskin, "Stones of Venice"; Browning, "Men and Women"; 
Motley, "Dutch Republic"; George Eliot, "Adam Bede"; Darwin, "Origin 
of Species"; Fitzgerald, "Rubaiyat"; Newman, "Apologia"; Arnold, 
"Essays in Criticism"; Whittier, "Snowbound." 

218 k. 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 1 

A book is judged by its peers. In the presence of 
the greater works of authors there is no room for personal 
criticism; they constitute in themselves the perpetual 
mind of the race, and dispense with any private view. 
The eye rests on these hundred titles of books famous 
in English literature, as it reads a physical map by peak, 
river, and coast, and sees in miniature the intellectual 
conformation of a nation. A different selection would 
only mean another point of view; some minor features 
might be replaced by others of similar subordination; 
but the mass of imagination and learning, the mind- 
achievement of the English race, is as unchangeable as 
a mountain landscape. Perspective thrusts its uncon- 
scious judgment on the eye of the mind; if from our own 
point of view Gower is thin with distance and the 
clump of the Elizabethans shows crowded with low 
spurs, the mind is not therefore deceived by the large 
pettiness of the modern foreground with its more numer- 
ous and distinct details. The mass governs. Darwin 
appeals to Milton; Shelley is judged by Pope, and Haw- 
thorne by Congreve. 

Great books must of necessity be national books; 
for fame, which is essentially the highest gift of which 
man has the giving, cannot be conferred except by a 
public voice. Fame dwells upon the lips of men. It 

1 Copyright, 1902, by The Grolier Club of the City of New York. 

219 



220 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

is not that memorable books must all be people's books, 
though the greatest are such — the Book of Common 
Prayer, the Bible, Shakespeare; but those which em- 
body some rare intellectual power, or illuminate some 
seldom visited tract of the spirit, or merely display some 
peculiar taste in learning or pastime, must yet have 
something racial in them, something public, to secure 
their hold against the detaching power of time; they must 
be English books, not in tongue only, but body and 
soul. They are not less the books of a nation because 
they are remote, superfine, uncommon, even unique. 
Such are the books of the poets — the "Faerie Queene"; 
books of the nobles — "Arcadia"; books of the scholar — 
the "Anatomy of Melancholy." These books open the 
national genius as truly, kind by kind, as books of 
knowledge exhibit the nation's advancement in learning, 
stage by stage, when new sciences are brought to the 
birth. Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," Locke's "Es- 
say," Blackstone's "Commentaries," are not merely the 
product of private minds. They are landmarks of Eng- 
lish intellect; and more, since they pass insensibly into 
the power of civilization in the land, feeding the general 
mind. The limited appeal that many classics made in 
their age, and still make, indicates lack of development 
in particular persons; but however numerous such 
individuals may be, in whatever majorities they may 
mass, the mind of the race, once having flowered, has 
flowered with the vigor of the stock. The "Compleat 
Angler" finds a rustic breast under much staid cloth; 
Pepys was never at a loss for a gossip since his seals 
were broken, and Donne evokes his fellow-eccentric 
whose hermitage is the scholar's bosom; but whether 
the charm work on few or on many is indifferent, for 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 221 

whom they affect, they affect through consanguinity. 
The books of a nation are those which are appropriate 
to its genius and embody its variations amid the changes 
of time; even its sports, like "Euphues," are itself; and 
the works which denote the evolution of its civilized 
life in fructifying progress, whose increasing diversities 
are yet held in the higher harmony of one race, one 
temperament, one destiny, are without metaphor its 
Sibylline books, and true oracles of empire. 

It is a sign of race in literature that a book can spare 
what is private to its author, and comes at last to forego 
his earth-life altogether. This is obvious of works of 
knowledge, since positive truth gains nothing from per- 
sonality, but feels it as an alloy; and a wise analysis 
will affirm the same of all long-lived books. Works of 
science are charters of nature, and submit to no human 
caprice; and, in a similar way, works of imagination, 
which are to the inward world of the spirit what works 
of science are to the natural universe, are charters of 
the soul, and borrow nothing from the hand that wrote 
them. How deciduous such books are of the private 
life needs only to be stated to be allowed. They cast 
biography from them like the cloak of the ascending 
prophet. An author is not rightly to be reckoned among 
immortals until he has been forgotten as a man, and 
become a shade in human memory, the myth of his own 
work. The anecdote lingering in the "Mermaid Tavern" 
is cocoon-stuff, and left for waste; time spiritualizes the 
soul it released in Shakespeare, and the speedier the 
change, so much the purer is the warrant of a life 
above death in the minds of men. The loneliness of 
antique names is the austerity of fame, and only there- 
with do Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, seem nobly clad and 



222 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

among equals; the nude figure of Shelley at Oxford is 
symbolical and prophetic of this disencumberment of 
mortality, the freed soul of the poet — like Bion, a divine 
form. Not to speak of those greatest works, the Prayer 
Book, the Bible, which seem so impersonal in origin as 
to be the creation of the English tongue itself and the 
genius of language adoring God; nor of Hakluyt or 
Clarendon, whose books are all men's actions; how little 
do the most isolated and seclusive authors, Surrey, Col- 
lins, Keats, perpetuate except the pure poet! In these 
hundred famous books there are few valued for aught 
more than they contain in themselves, or which require 
any other light to read them by than what they bring 
with them; they are rather hampered than helped by 
the recollection of their author's careers. Sidney adds 
luster to the "Arcadia"; an exception among men, in this 
as all other ways, by virtue of that something superemi- 
nent in him which dazzled his own age. But who else 
of famous authors is greater in his life than in his book? 
It is the book that gives significance to the man, not the 
man to the book. These authors would gain by oblivion 
of themselves, and that in proportion to their greatness, 
thereby being at once removed into the impersonal 
region of man's permanent spirit and of art. The ex- 
ceptions are only seemingly such ; it is Johnson's thought 
and the style of a great mind that preserve Bos well, not 
his human grossness; and in Pepys it is the mundane 
and every-day immortality of human nature, this perma- 
nently curious and impertinent world, not his own 
scandal and peepings, that yield him allowance in li- 
braries. In all books to which a nation stands heir, 
it is man that survives — the aspect of an epoch, the 
phase of a religion, the mood of a generation, the taste, 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 223 

sentiment, thought, pursuit, entertainment, of a historic 
and diversified people. There is nothing accidental in 
the fact that of these hundred books forty-six bear no 
author's name upon the title-page; nor is this due 
merely to the eldest style of printing, as with Chaucer, 
Gower, Malory, Langland; nor to the inclusion of 
works by several hands — the Book of Common Prayer, 
the "Mirror for Magistrates," the "Tatler," the "Specta- 
tor," the "Reliques," the "Federalist"; nor to the use of 
initials, as in the case of Donne and Mrs. Browning. The 
characteristic is constant. It is interesting to note the 
names thus self-suppressed: Sackville, Spenser, Bacon, 
Burton, Browne, Walton, Butler, Dryden, Locke, Defoe, 
Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gray, Franklin, Goldsmith, 
Sterne, Smollett, Sheridan, White, Wordsworth, Irving, 
Austen, Scott, Lamb, Cooper, Carlyle, Emerson, Bronte, 
Lowell, Tennyson, George Eliot, Fitzgerald. 

The broad and various nationality of English litera- 
ture is a condition precedent to greatness, and underlies 
its mighty fortune. Its chief glory is its continuity, by 
which it exceeds the moderns, and must, with ages, sur- 
pass antiquity. Literary genius has been so unfailing 
in the English race that men of this blood live in the 
error that literature, like light and air, is a common ele- 
ment in the life of populations. Literature is really the 
work of selected nations, and with them is not a con- 
stant product. Many nations have no literature, and 
in fertile nations there are barren centuries. The 
splendid perpetuity of Greek literature, which covered 
two thousand years, was yet broken by lean ages, by 
periods of desert dearth. In the English, beginning 
from Chaucer (as is just, since he is our Homer, what- 
ever ages went before Troy or Canterbury), there have 



224 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

been reigns without a poet; and Greek example might 
prepare the mind for Alexandrian and Byzantine periods 
in the future, were it not for the grand modern combi- 
nations of world-colonies and world-contacts which open 
new perspectives of time for which the mind, as part 
of its faith in life, requires destinies as large. The gaps, 
however, were greatest at the beginning, and grow less. 
One soil, one government, one evenly unfolded civiliza- 
tion — long life in the settled and peaceful land — con- 
tribute to this continuity of literature in the English; 
but its explanation lies in the integrity of English nur- 
ture, and this is essentially the same in all persons of 
English blood. Homer was not more truly the school 
of Greece than the Bible has been the school of the 
English. It has overcome all external change in form, 
rule, and institution, fused conventicle and cathedral, and 
in dissolving separate and narrow bonds of union has 
proved the greatest bond of all, and become like a tie 
of blood. English piety is of one stock, and through 
every book of holy living where its treasures are laid up, 
there blows the breath of one Spirit. Herbert and Bun- 
yan are peers of a faith undivided in the hearts of their 
countrymen. It does not change, but is the same yester- 
day, to-day, and forever. On the secular side, also, 
English nurture has been of the like simple strain. The 
instinct of adventure, English derring-do, has never 
failed. Holinshed and Hakluyt were its chroniclers of 
old; and from the "Morte d'Arthur" to Sidney, from the 
Red-Cross Knight to Ivanhoe, from Shakespeare's 
Henry to Tennyson's Grenville, genius has not ceased 
to stream upon it, a broad river of light. The Word 
of God fed English piety; English daring is fed upon 
the deeds of men. Hear Shakespeare's Henry: "Plu- 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 225 

tarch always delights me with a fresh novelty. To love 
him is to love me; for he has been long time the instruc- 
tor of my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, 
and who would not wish, she said, to see her son an 
illustrious dunce, put this book into my hands almost 
when I was a child at the breast. It has been like my 
conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good sug- 
gestions and maxims for my conduct and the government 
of my affairs." The English Plutarch is written on the 
earth's face. Its battles have named the lands and 
seas of all the world; but from Harold to Cromwell, 
from the first Conqueror to Wellington, from the Black 
Prince to Gordon, as was said of English piety, English 
daring — the strength of the yeoman, the breath of the 
noble — is of one stock. Race lasts; those who are born 
in the eyrie will find eagle's food. It has planted iron 
resolution and all-hazarding courage in epic-drama and 
battle-ode, and, as in the old riddle, feeds on what it 
fed. English literature is brave, martial, and brings 
forth men-children. It has the clarion strength of em- 
pire; like Taillefer at Hastings, Drayton and Tennyson 
still lead the charge at Agincourt and Balaclava. As 
Shakespeare's Henry was nourished, so was the English 
spirit in all ages bred. This integrity of English nur- 
ture, seen in these two great modes of life turned toward 
God in the soul and toward the world in action, is as 
plainly to be discerned in details as in these generalities ; 
and to state only one other broad aspect of the facts 
governing the continuity of literary genius in the Eng- 
lish, but one that goes to the foundations, the condi- 
tion that both vivifies and controls that genius in law, 
metaphysics, science, in all political writing, whether 
history, theory, or discussion, as well as in the creative 



226 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

and artistic modes of its development, is freedom. The 
freedom of England, which is the parent of its greatness 
in all ways, is as old in the race as fear of God and love 
of peril; and, through its manifold and primary opera- 
tion in English nurture, is the true continuer of its litera- 
ture. 

A second grand trait of English literature is its enor- 
mous assimilative power. So great is this that he who 
would know English must be a scholar in all literatures, 
2nd that with no shallow learning. The old figure of 
the torch handed down from nation to nation, as the 
type of man's higher life, gives up its full meaning only 
to the student, and to him it may come to seem that 
the torch is all and the hand that bears it dust and ashes ; 
often he finds in its light only the color of his own 
studies, and names it Greek, Semitic, Hindu, and looks 
on English, French and Latin as mere carriers of the 
flame. In so old a symbol there must be profound truth, 
and it conveys the sense of antiquity in life, of the 
deathlessness of civilization, and something also of its 
superhuman origin — the divine gift of fire transmitted 
from above; but civilization is more than an inheritance, 
it is a power; and truth is always more than it was; and 
wherever the torch was lit, its light is the burning of 
a living race of men. The dependence of the present on 
the past, of a younger on an older people, of one nation 
on another, is often misinterpreted and misleads; life 
cannot be given, but only knowledge, example, direc- 
tion — influence, but not essence; and the impact of 
one literature upon another, or of an old historic cul- 
ture upon a new and ungrown people, is more external 
than is commonly represented. The genius of a nation 
born to greatness is irresistible, it remains itself, it does 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 227 

not become another. The Greeks conquered Rome, men 
say, through the mind; and Rome conquered the bar- 
barians through the mind; but in Gibbon who finds 
Greece? and the mind of Europe does not bear the 
ruling stamp of either a Byzantine or Italian Rome. In 
the narrowly temporal and personal view, even under the 
overwhelming might of Greece, Virgil remained, what 
Tennyson calls him, "Roman Virgil"; and in the other 
capital instance of apparently all-conquering literary 
power, under the truth that went forth from Judea into 
all lands, Dante remained Italian and Milton English. 
Yet in these three poets, whose names are synonyms of 
their country, the assimilated element is so great that 
their minds might be said to have been educated abroad. 
What is true of Milton is true of the young English 
mind, from Chaucer and earlier. In the beginning Eng- 
lish literature was a part of European literature, and 
held a position in it analogous to that which the litera- 
ture of America occupies in all English speech; it was 
not so much colonial as a part of the same world. The 
first works were European books written on English soil ; 
Chaucer, Gower and Malory used the matter of Europe, 
but they retained the tang of English, as Emerson keeps 
the tang of America. The name applied to Gower, 
"the moral Gower," speaks him English; and Arthur, 
"the flower of kings," remains forever Arthur of Britain; 
and the Canterbury pilgrimage, whatever the source of 
the world-wandering tales, gives the first crowded scene 
of English life. In Langland, whose form was medie- 
val, lay as in the seed the religious and social history 
of a Protestant, democratic, and labor-honoring nation. 
In the next age, with the intellectual sovereignty of hu- 
manism, Surrey, Sackville, Lyly, Sidney and Spenser put 



228 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

all the new realms of letters under tribute, and made cap- 
ture with a royal hand of whatever they would have for 
their own of the world's finer wealth; the dramatists 
gathered again the tales of all nations; and, period 
following period, Italy, Spain, and France, in turn, and 
the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin unceasingly, brought their 
treasures, light or precious, to each generation of au- 
thors, until the last great burst of the age now closing, 
itself indebted most universally to all the past and all 
the world. Yet each new wave that washed empire 
to the land retreated, leaving the genius of English un- 
impaired and richer only in its own strength. Notwith- 
standing the concettisti, the heroic drama, the Celtic 
mist, which passed like shadows from the kingdom, the 
instinct of the authors held to the massive sense of 
Latin and the pure form of Greek and Italian, and con- 
stituted these the enduring humane culture of English 
letters and their academic tradition. The permanence 
of this tradition in literary education has been of vast 
importance, and is to the literary class, in so far as they 
are separate by training, what the integrity of English 
nurture at large has been to the nation. The poets, 
especially, have been learned in this culture; and, so 
far from being self-sprung from the soil, were molded 
into power by every finer touch of time. Chaucer, 
Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley, Tennyson, are the capi- 
tal names that illustrate the toil of the scholar, and ap- 
prove the mastery of that classical culture which has 
ever been the most fruitful in the choicest minds. 
As on the broad scale English literature is dis- 
tinguished by its general assimilative power, being hos- 
pitable to all knowledge, it is most deeply and intimately, 
because continuously, indebted to humane studies, in 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 229 

the strictest sense, and has derived from them not, as 
in many other cases, transitory matter and the fashion of 
an hour, but the form and discipline of art itself. In 
assimilating this to English nature, literary genius in- 
curred its greatest obligation, and in thereby discover- 
ing artistic freedom found its greatest good. This 
academic tradition has created English culture, which 
is perhaps best described as an instinctive standard of 
judgment, and is the necessary complement to that open- 
ness of mind that has characterized English literature 
from the first. Nor is this last word a paradox, but the 
simple truth, as is plain from the assimilative power here 
dwelt upon. The English genius is always itself; no 
element of greatness could inhere in it otherwise; but, 
in literature, it has had the most open mind of any 
nation. 

A third trait of high distinction in English literature 
and one not unconnected with its continuity and recep- 
tivity, is its copiousness. This is not a matter of mere 
number, of voluminousness ; there is an abundance of 
kinds. In the literature of knowledge, what branch is 
unfruitful? and in the literature of power, what fountain- 
head is unstruck by the rod? Only the Italian genius 
in its prime shows such supreme equality in diversity. 
How many human interests are exemplified, and how 
many amply illustrated, exhibiting in a true sense and 
not by hyperbole myriad-minded man! In the English 
genius there seems something correspondent to this 
marvelous efficacy of faculty and expression; it has 
largeness of power. The trait most commonly thought 
of in connection with Aristotle as an individual — "mas- 
ter of those who know" — and in connection with medie- 
val schoolmen as a class, is not less characteristic of 



2 3 o THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

the English, though it appears less. The voracity of 
Chaucer for all literary knowledge, which makes him 
encyclopedic of a period, is matched at the end of these 
centuries by Newman, whose capaciousness of intellect 
was inclusive of all he cared to know. Bacon, in saying, 
"I take all knowledge to be my province," did not so 
much make a personal boast as utter a national motto. 
The great example is, of course, Shakespeare, on whose 
universality later genius has exhausted metaphor; but 
for everything that he knew in little, English can show 
a large literature, and exceeds his comprehensiveness. 
The fact is best illustrated by adverting to what this 
list spares. English is rich in translations, and in this 
sort of exchange the balance of trade is always in 
favor of the importer. Homer alone is included here — 
to except the Bible, which has been so inbred in Eng- 
land as to have become an English book to an eye that 
clings to the truth through all appearances ; but how rich 
in great national books is a literature that can omit so 
noble a work, though translated, and one so historic in Eng- 
lish, as North's "Plutarch"! In the literature of knowl- 
edge, Greek could hardly have passed over Euclid; but 
Newton's "Principia" is here not required. Sir Thomas 
More is one of the noblest English names, and his "Utopia" 
is a memorable book; but it drops from the list. Nor is 
it names and books only that disappear; but, as these 
last instances suggest, kinds of literature go out with 
them. Platonism falls into silence with the pure tones 
of Vaughan, in whom light seems almost audible; and 
the mystic Italian fervor of the passional spirit fades 
with Crashaw. The books of politeness, though de- 
scended from Castiglione, depart with Chesterfield, per- 
haps from some pettiness that had turned courtesy into 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 231 

etiquette; and parody retires with Buckingham. Latin 
literature was almost rewritten in English during the 
eighteenth century; but the traces of it here are few. 
Of inadequate representation, how slight is burlesque in 
Butler, and the presence of Chevy Chase hardly com- 
pensates for the absence of the war-ballad in Drayton 
and Campbell. So it is with a hundred instances. In 
another way of illustration, it is to be borne in mind that 
each author appears by only one title; and while it may 
be true that commonly each finer spirit stores up his 
immortality in some one book that is a more perfect 
vessel of time, yet fecundity is rightly reckoned as a sign 
of greatness and measure of it in the most, and the 
production of many books makes a name bulk larger. 
Mass counts, when in addition to quality; and the great- 
est have been plentiful writers. No praise can make 
Gray seem more than a remnant of genius, and no quali- 
fication of the verdict can deprive Dryden and Jonson 
of largeness. It belongs to genius to tire not in crea- 
tion, thereby imitating the excess of nature flowing from 
unhusbanded sources. Yet among these hundred books, 
as in scientific classification, one example must stand for 
all, except when some folio, like an ark, comes to the 
rescue of a Beaumont and Fletcher. This is cutting the 
diamond with itself. But within these limits, narrowing 
circle within circle, what a universe of man remains! 
Culture after culture, epoch by epoch, are laid bare as 
in geologic strata — medieval tale and history, human- 
istic form, the Shakespearian age, Puritan, Cavalier, man 
scientific, reforming, reborn into a new natural, political, 
artistic world, man modern; and in every layer of imagi- 
nation and learning lies, whole and entire, a buried Eng- 
lish age. It is by virtue of its copiousness that English 



232 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

literature is so representative, both of man's individual 
spirit in its restless forms of apprehension and embodi- 
ment, and of its historic formulation in English progress 
as national power. 

The realization of this long-lived, far-gathering, abound- 
ing English literature, in these external phases, leaves 
untouched its original force. Whence is its germinating 
power — what is this genius of the English? It is the 
same in literature as in all its other manifold manifesta- 
tions, for man is forever unitary and of one piece. Curi- 
osity, which is the distinction of progressive peoples, is 
perhaps its initial and moving source. The trait which 
has sent the English broadcast over the world and mingled 
their history with the annals of all nations is the same 
that has so blended their literature with the history of all 
tongues. The acquisitive power which has created the 
empire of the English, with dominion on dominion, is 
parallel with the faculty that assimilates past literatures 
with the body of their literary speech. But curiosity is 
only half the word. It is singular that the first quality 
which occurs to the mind in connection with the English 
is, almost universally and often exclusively, their prac- 
ticality. They are really the most romantic of all na- 
tions; romanticism is the other half of their genius, and 
supplements that positive element of knowledge-hunting 
or truth-seeking which is indicated by their endless curi- 
osity. Possibly the Elizabethan age is generally thought 
of as a romantic period, as if it were exceptional; and 
the romantic vigor of the late Georgian period, though 
everywhere acknowledged, is primarily regarded as more 
strictly a literary and not a national characteristic in its 
time, but, like all interesting history, English history 
was continuously romantic. The days of the crusaders, 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 233 

the Wars of the Roses, and the French wars were of 
the same strain in action and character, in adventurous 
travel, in personal fate, in contacts, as were the times 
of Shakespeare's world or of the world of Waterloo. 
What a reinforcement of character in the English has 
India been, how restorative of greatness in the blood! 
It must be that romanticism should characterize a great 
race, and, when appealing to a positive genius, the 
greatest race; for in it are all the invitations of destiny. 
Futurity broods and brings forth in its nest. Romanti- 
cism is the lift of life in a people that does not merely 
continue, but grows, spreads and overcomes. The sphere 
of the word is not to be too narrowly confined, as only 
a bookish phrase of polite letters. 

In the world of knowledge the pursuit of truth is ro- 
mantic. The scientific inquirer lives in a realm of 
strangeness and in the presence of the unknown, in a 
place so haunted with profound feeling, so electric with 
the emotions that feed great minds, that whether awe 
of the unsolved or of the solved be the stronger senti- 
ment he cannot tell; and the appeal made to him — to 
the explorer in every bodily peril, to the experimenter in 
the den of untamed forces, to the thinker in his solitude 
— is often a romantic appeal. The moments of great 
discoveries are romantic moments, as is seen in Keats's 
sonnet, lifting Cortez and the star-gazer on equal heights 
with the reader of the "Iliad." The epic of science is a 
Columbiad without end. Nor is this less true of those 
branches of knowledge esteemed most dry and prosaic. 
Locke, Adam Smith, Darwin were all similarly placed 
with Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Copernicus; the mind, 
society, and nature, severally, were their Americas. 
Even in this age of the mechanical application of forces, 



234 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

which by virtue of the large part of these inventions 
in daily and world-wide life seems superficially, and is 
called, a materialistic age, romanticism is paramount 
and will finally be seen so. Are not these things in 
our time what Drake and Spanish gold and Virginia, 
what Clive and the Indies, were to other centuries? It 
is true that the element of commercial gain blends with 
other phases of our inventions, and seems a debasement, 
an avarice; but so it was in all ages. Nor are the appli- 
cations of scientific discovery for the material ends of 
wealth other or relatively greater now than the applica- 
tions of geographical discovery, for example, to the same 
ends were in Elizabeth's reign and later. In the first 
ages commercial gain was in league with the waves from 
which rose the "Odyssey" — a part of that early trading, 
coasting world, as it was always a part of the artistic 
world of Athens. | Gain in any of its material forms, 
whether wealth, power or rank, does not debase the 
knowledge, the courage of heart, the skill of hand and 
brain, from which it flows, for it is their natural and 
proper fruit; nor does it by itself materialize either the 
man or the nation, else civilization were doomed from 
the start, and the pursuit of truth would end in humilia- 
tion and ignominy. It is rather the attitude of mind 
toward this new world of knowledge and this spectacle of 
man now imperializing through nature's forces as formerly 
through discovery of the earth's lands and seas, that 
makes the character of our age. Romanticism, being 
the enveloping mood in whose atmosphere the spirit of 
man beholds life, as it were, the light on things, changes 
its aspect in the process of the ages with the emergence 
of each new world of man's era; and as it once in- 
hered in English loyalty and the piety of Christ's sepul- 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 235 

chre, and in English voyaging over-seas and colonizing 
of the lands, it now inheres in the conquest of natural 
force for the arts of peace. The present age exceeds 
its predecessors in marvel in proportion as the victories 
of the intellect are in a world of finer secrecy than any 
horizon veils, and build an empire of greater breadth and 
endurance than any monarch or sovereign people or 
domineering race selfishly achieves; its victories are in 
the unseen of force and thought, and it brings among 
men the undecaying empire of knowledge as inexpugn- 
able as the mind in man and inappropriable as light 
and air. Here, as elsewhere, it is the sensual eye that 
sees the sensual thing, but the spiritual eye spiritually 
discerns. It is romance that adds this "precious seeing" 
to the eye. Openness to the call, capability of the pas- 
sion, and character, so sensitized and molded in individ- 
uals and made hereditary in a civilization and a race and 
idealized in conscience, constitute the motor-genius of a 
nation, which is its finding faculty; and the apprecia- 
tion of results and putting them to the use of men make 
its conserving and positive power. These two, indistin- 
guishably married and blended, are the English genius. 
A positive genius following a romantic lead, a romantic 
genius yielding a positive good, equally describe it from 
opposed points of view; yet in the finer spirits and in the 
long age the romantic temperament is felt to be the fer- 
tilizing element, to be character as opposed to perform- 
ance. Greatness lies always in the unaccomplished deed, 
as in the lonely anecdote of Newton: "I do not know 
what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem 
to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, 
and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother 
pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the 



236 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." 
So Tennyson with his "wages of going on," and Sir 
John Franklin and Gordon in their lives. This spiritual 
breath of the nation in all its activities through centu- 
ries is the breath of its literature, there embodied in its 
finer being and applied to the highest uses for the civ- 
ilization and culture of the nation by truth and art. 
In English literary history, and in its men of genius 
taken individually, the positive or the romantic may 
predominate, each in its own moment; but the conspec- 
tus of the whole assigns to each its true levels. Ro- 
manticism condensed in character, which is the creation 
of the highest poetic genius, the rarest work of man, 
has its illustrative example in Shakespeare, the first of 
all writers; he followed it through all its modes, and 
perhaps its simplest types are Henry IV for action, 
Romeo for passion, and "Hamlet," which is the romance 
of thought. Before Shakespeare, Spenser closed the 
earliest age, which had been shaped by a diffused ro- 
mantic tradition, inherited from medievalism, though in 
its later career masked under Renaissance forms; and 
since Shakespeare, a similar diffused romantic prescience, 
in the region of the common life and of revolutionary 
causes most significantly, brought in the age that has 
now passed its first flower, but has yet long to run. 
These are the three great ages of English poetry. In 
the interval between the second and the third, the mag- 
nificently accomplished school of the eighteenth century 
gave to English an age of cultivated repose, in which 
Pope, its best example, lived on the incomes of the past, 
and, together with the younger and the elder men he 
knew, exhibited in literature that conserving and posi- 
tive power which is the economy of national genius; 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 237 

but even in that great century, wherever the future woke, 
there was a budding romanticism, in Collins, Gray, Wal- 
pole, Thomson, Cowper, Blake. Such was the history 
of English poetry, and the same general statement will 
be found applicable to English prose, though in a lower 
tone, due to the nature of prose. Taken in the large, 
important as the positive element in it is, the English 
literary genius is, like the race, temperamentally roman- 
tic, to the nerve and bone. 

This view becomes increasingly apparent on examina- 
tion of the service of this literature to civilization and 
the individual soul of man, which is the great function 
of literature, and of its place in the world of art. 

"How shall the world be served?" was Chaucer's 
question; and it has never been absent from any great 
mind of the English stock. The literature of a nation, how- 
ever, including, as here, books of knowledge, is so nearly 
synonymous with the mind in all its operations in the 
national life, as to be coextensive with civilization, and 
hardly separable from it. Civilization is cast in the 
mold of thought, and retains the brute necessity of na- 
ture only as mass, but not as surface; it is the flowering 
of human forces in the formal aspect of life, and of these 
literature is one mode, reflecting in its many phases all 
the rest in their manifestations, and inwardly feeding 
them in their vital principle. The universality of its 
touch on life is indicated by the fact that it has made 
the English a lettered people, the alphabet as common 
as numbers, and the ability to read almost as wide-spread 
in the race as the ability to count. Its service, there- 
fore, cannot be summarized any more than you can sum- 
marize the dictionary of its words. It is possible to 
bring within the compass of a paragraph only hints 



238 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

and guide-marks of its work; and naturally these would 
be gathered from its most comprehensive influences in 
the higher spheres of intellect and morals, in the world 
of ideas, and in the person of those writers who were 
either the founders or restorers of knowledge. Such a 
cardinal service was the Baconian method, to take a 
single great instance, which may almost be said to have 
reversed the logical habit of the mind of Europe, and 
to have summoned nature to a new bar. It is enough 
to name this. Of books powerful in intellectual results, 
Locke's "Essay" is, perhaps, thought of as metaphysical 
and remote, yet it was of immeasurable influence at 
home and abroad, so subtly penetrating as to resemble 
in scale and intimacy the silent forces of nature. It was 
great as a representative of the spirit of rationalism, 
which it supported and spread with incalculable results 
on the temper of educated Europe; and great also as a 
product and embodiment of that cold, intellectual habit, 
distinctive of a certain kind of English mind, and usually 
regarded as radical in the race. It was great by the 
variety as well as the range of its influence, and was felt 
in all regions of abstract thought and those practical arts, 
education, government and the like, then most affected 
by such thought; it permanently modified the cast of 
men's minds. In opposition to it new philosophical move- 
ments found their mainspring. A similar honor belongs 
to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" in another century. 
It is customary to eulogize the pioneer, and to credit the 
first openers of Californias with the wealth of all the 
mines worked by later comers; and, in this sense, the 
words of Buckle are, perhaps, to be taken: "Adam Smith 
contributed more, by the publication of this single work, 
towards the happiness of men than has been effected by 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 239 

the united abilities of all the statesmen and legislators of 
whom history has preserved an authentic account." But 
the excess of the statement is a proof of the largeness of 
the truth it contains, and like-minded praise is not from 
Buckle alone, but may be found in half a score of thought- 
ful and temperate authors. In the last age, Darwin, by 
his "Origin of Species," most arrested the attention of the 
scientific mind, and stimulated the highly educated world 
with surprise. He was classed with Copernicus, as hav- 
ing brought man's pretension to be the first of created 
things, and their lord from the beginning, under the de- 
stroying criticism of scientific time and its order, in the 
same way that Copernicus brought the pretension of the 
earth to be the center of the universe under a like criti- 
cism of scientific space and its order ; and in these proud 
statements there is some measure of truth. The ideas of 
Darwin compel a readjustment of man's thoughts with 
regard to his temporal and natural relation to the uni- 
verse in which he finds himself; and the vast generalities 
of all evolutionary thought received from Darwin immense 
stimulus, its method greater scope, and its results a firmer 
hold on the general mind, with an influence still unfathom- 
able upon man's highest beliefs with regard to his origin 
and destiny. There are epochs in the intellectual history 
of the race as marked as the geological' epochs of the 
globe; and such works as these, in the literature of knowl- 
edge show the times of the opening of the seals. 

In addition to the service so done in the advancement 
of civilization by the discovery of new truth, as great 
benefaction is accomplished by the continual agitation and 
exercise of men's minds in the ideas that are not new 
but the ever-living inheritance from the past, whose per- 
manence through all epochs shows their deep grounding 



240 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

in the race they nourish. In English such ideas are, 
especially, in the view of the whole world, ideas of civil 
and religious liberty in the widest sense and particularly 
as worked out in legal and political history. The com- 
mon law of England in Blackstone is a mighty legacy. 
On the large public scale, and as involved in the constitu- 
tional making of a great nation, the "Federalist" is a docu- 
ment invaluable as setting forth essentials of free govern- 
ment under a particular application; and for comment 
on social liberty, Burke, on the conservative, and Paine, 
on the radical side, exhibit the scope, the weight and 
fire of English thought. Of still greater significance, for 
the mass and variety of teaching, is that commentary on 
man's freedom which is contained in the operation of 
liberty and its increase as presented in the long story of 
England's greatness recorded in the works of her his- 
torians from Holinshed to Macaulay, with what the last 
prolific generation has, added. They are exceeded in the 
dignity of their labors by Gibbon, whose work on Rome, 
which Mommsen called the greatest of all histories and is 
often likened to a mighty bridge spanning the gulf be- 
tween the ancient and the modern world, was a contribu- 
tion to European learning; but the historians of English 
liberty have more profitably served mankind. At yet 
another remove, the ideas of liberty — and the mind ac- 
quainted with English books is dazzled by the vast com- 
prehensiveness of such a phrase — are again poured 
through the nation's life-blood by all her poets, and well- 
nigh all her writers in prose, in one or another mode of 
the Promethean fire. These ideas are never silent, never 
quiescent; they work in the substance, they shape the 
form and feature, of English thought; they are the neces- 
sary element of its being; they constitute the race of 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 241 

freemen, and are known in every language as English 
ideas. They give sublimity to the figure of Milton; they 
are the feeding-flame of Shelley's mind; they alone lift 
Tennyson to an eagle-flight of song. In the unceasing 
celebration of ideal liberty, and its practical life in Eng- 
lish character and events, the literature of England has, 
perhaps, done a greater service than in the positive ad- 
vancement of knowledge, for it is more fundamental in 
the national life. Touching the subject almost at ran- 
dom, such are a few of the points of contact between 
English books and the civilization of men. 
^ It is still more difficult to state briefly the action of 
literature on the individual for what is more distinctly his 
private gain, in the enlargement of his life, the direction 
of his thoughts, and bringing him into harmony with the 
world. As, in regard to civilization, the emphasis lay 
rather on the literature of knowledge, here it lies on the 
literature of power — on imaginative and reflective works. 
Its initial office is educative; it feeds the imagination and 
the powers of sympathy, and trains not only the affections 
but all feeling; and in these fields it is the only instru- 
ment of education outside of real experience. It is this 
that gives it such primacy as to make acquaintance with 
humane letters almost synonymous with culture. No ac- 
tual world is large enough for a man to live in; at the 
lowest, there is some tradition of the past, some expecta- 
tion of the future; and, though training in the senses is 
an important part of early life, yet the greater part of 
education consists in putting the young in possession of 
an unseen world. The biograph is a marvelous toy of 
the time, but literature in its lower forms of information, 
of history, travel, and description, has been a biograph 
for the mind's eye from the beginning; and in its higher 



242 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

forms of art it performs a greater service by bringing into 
mental vision what it is above the power of nature to pro- 
duce. To expand the mind to the compass of space and 
time, and to people these with the thoughts of mankind, 
to revive the past and penetrate the reality of the pres- 
ent, is the joint work of all literature; and as a prepara- 
tion for individual life, in unfolding the faculties and the 
feelings, humane letters achieve their most essential task. 
Literature furnishes the gymnasia for all youth, in that 
part of their nature in which the highest power of human- 
ity lies. But this is only, as was said, its initial 
office. Throughout life it acts in the same way on old 
and young alike. The dependence of all men on thought, 
and of thought on speech, is a profound matter, though 
as little considered as gravitation that keeps the world 
entire; and the speech on which such a strain of life lies is 
the speech of books. How has Longfellow consoled mid- 
dle life in its human trials, how has Carlyle roused man- 
hood, and Emerson illumined life for his readers at every 
stage! Scott is a benefactor of millions by virtue of the 
entertainment he has given to English homes and the 
lonely hours of his fellow-men now for three generations, 
to an extent hardly measurable in thought; and so in 
hardly a less degree is Dickens, and, though diminish- 
ing in inclusive power, are Thackeray, Austen, Bronte, 
Cooper, Hawthorne, George Eliot, to name only novelists. 
Each century has had its own story-telling from Chaucer 
down, though masked in the Elizabethan period as 
drama, and in each much hearty and refined pleasure 
has been afforded by the spectacle of life in books; but 
in the last age the benefit so conferred is to be reckoned 
among the greater blessings of civilization. It is singu- 
lar that humor, so prime and constant a factor in Eng- 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 243 

lish, should have so few books altogether its own, and 
these not of the greater class ; but the spirit which yields 
burlesque in Butler and Irving, and comedy in Massinger, 
Congreve, and Sheridan, pervades the body of English 
literature and characterizes it among national literatures. 
The highest mind is incomplete without humor, for a 
perfect idealism includes laughter at the real; and it 
is natural, for, the principle of humor being incongruity 
to the intellect, it is properly most keen in those in 
whom the idea of order, which is the mother-idea of the 
intellect, is most omnipresent and controlling; but as 
humor is thus auxiliary in character, it is found to be 
subordinate also in English literature as a whole. The 
constancy of its presence, however, is a sign of the 
general health of the English genius, which has turned 
to morbidity far less than that of other nations ancient 
or modern. It is a cognate fact, here, that great books 
are never frivolous; they leave the reader wiser and 
better, as well through laughter as through tears, or 
they sustain imaginative and sympathetic power already 
acquired. They open the world of humanity to the 
heart, and they open the heart to itself. In another 
region, not primarily of entertainment, the value of 
literature lies in its function to inspire. In individual 
life, each finer spirit of the past touches with an electric 
force those of his own kindred as they are born into the 
world of letters, and often for life. The later poets 
have most personal power in this way. Burns, Words- 
worth, Byron, Shelley, have been the inspirations of lives, 
like Carlyle and Emerson in prose. The most intense 
example of national inspiration in a book is "Uncle 
Tom's Cabin''; but in quieter ways Scotland feels the 
pulse of Burns, and England the many-mingled throb- 
bing of the poets in her blood. 



244 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

On the large scale, in the impact of literature on the 
individual soul and through that on the national belief, 
aspiration, and resolve, the great sphere of influence lies 
necessarily in the religious life, because that is universal 
and constant from birth to death and spreads among the 
secret springs and sources of man's essential nature. It 
is a commonplace, it has sometimes been made a re- 
proach, that English literature is predominantly moral 
and religious, and the fact is plainly so. The strain 
that began with "Piers Plowman" flourished more 
mightily in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The psalm-note 
that was a tone of character in Surrey, Wyatt, and Sid- 
ney gave perfect song in Milton, both poet and man. 
From Butler to Newman the intellect, applied to reli- 
gion, did not fail in strenuous power. Taylor's "Holy 
Living" is a saint's book. If religious poets, of one 
pure strain of Sabbath melody, have been rare, yet 
Herbert, Vaughan, Cowper, Keble, Whittier, are to the 
memory Christian names, with the humility and breath- 
ing peace of sacred song. The portion of English litera- 
ture expressly religious is enlarged by the works of au- 
thors, both in prose and verse, in which religion was an 
occasional theme and often dealt with; and the religious 
and moral influence of the body of literature as a whole 
on the English race is immensely increased by those 
writers into whom the Christian spirit entered as a mas- 
ter-light of reason and imagination, such as Spenser in 
the "Faerie Queene" and Wordsworth in his works 
generally, or Gray in the solemn thought of the "Elegy." 
To particularize is an endless task; for the sense of 
duty toward man and God is of the bone and flesh of 
English books in every age, being planted in the Eng- 
lish nature. This vast mass of experience and counsel, 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 245 

of praise and prayer, of insight and leading, variously 
responding to every phase of the religious consciousness 
of the historic people, has been, like the general harvest, 
the daily food of the nation in its spiritual life. If 
Shakespeare is the greatest of our writers, the English 
Bible is the greatest of our books; and the whole matter 
is summarized in saying that the Bible, together with 
the Book of Common Prayer, is the most widely distrib- 
uted, the most universally influential, the most gen- 
erally valued and best -read book of the English people, 
and this has been true since the diffusion of printing. 
It may seem only the felicity of time that the English 
language best adorns its best books; but it is by a higher 
blessing that English character centers in this book, 
that English thinkers see by it, that English poets feel 
by it, that the English people live by it; for it has passed 
into the blood of all English veins. 

It is natural to inquire, after dwelling so much on the 
practical power of English literature in society and life, 
what is its value in the world of art, in that sphere 
where questions of perfection in the form, of perma- 
nence in the matter, and the like, arise. If the stand- 
ards of an academic classicism be applied, English litera- 
ture will fall below both Latin and Greek, and the Italian 
and French, and take a lower place with German and 
Spanish, to which it is most akin. But such standards 
are pseudo-classical at best, and under modern criticism 
find less ground in the ancients. The genius of the Eng- 
lish is romantic, and originated romantic forms proper 
to itself, and by these it should be judged. The time is, 
perhaps, not wholly gone by when the formlessness of 
Shakespeare may be found spoken of as a matter of 
course, as the formlessness of Shelley is still generally 



246 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

alleged; but if neither of these has form in the pseudo- 
classic, the Italian and French, sense of convention, de- 
corum, and limit, they were creators of that romantic 
form in which English, together with Spanish, marks 
the furthest original modern advance. The subject is 
too large, and too much a matter of detail, for this place; 
but it is the less necessary to expand it, for it is as 
superfluous to establish the right of Shakespeare in the 
realm of the most perfect art as to examine the title- 
deeds of Alexander's conquests. He condensed roman- 
ticism in character, as was said above; and in the power 
with which he did this, in the wisdom, beauty and 
splendor of his achievement, excelled all others, both 
for substance and art. The instinct of fame may be 
safely followed in assigning a like primacy to Milton. 
The moment which Milton occupied in the climax of a liter- 
ary movement, is, perhaps, not commonly observed with 
accuracy. The drama developed out of allegorical and 
abstract, and through historical, into entirely human 
and ideal forms; and in Shakespeare this process is 
completed. The same movement, on the religious as 
opposed to the secular line, took place more slowly. 
Spenser, like Sackville, works by impersonation of moral 
qualities, viewed abstractly; the Fletchers, who carried 
on his tradition, employ the same method, which gives a 
remote and often fantastic character to their work; nor 
was moral and religious poetic narrative truly human- 
ized, and given ideal power in character and event, until 
Milton carried it to its proper artistic culmination in 
"Paradise Lost." Milton stands to the evolution of 
this branch of poetic literature, springing from the 
miracle-plays, precisely as Shakespeare does to the 
branch of ideal drama; and thus, although he fell out- 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 247 

side of the great age, and was sixty years later than 
Shakespeare in completing the work, the singularity of 
his literary greatness, his loneliness as a lofty genius in 
his time, becomes somewhat less inexplicable. The 
"Paradise Lost" occupies this moment of climax, to re- 
peat the phrase, in literary history, and, like nearly all 
works in such circumstances, it has a greatness all its 
own. But, beyond that, it lies in a region of art where 
no other English work companions it, as an epic of the 
romantic spirit such as Italy most boasts of, but superior 
in breadth, in ethical power, in human interest, to Ariosto 
or Tasso, and comparing with them as Pindar with the 
Alexandrians; it realized Hell and Eden, and the world 
of heavenly war and the temptation, to the vision of 
men, with tremendous imaginative power, stamping them 
into the race-mind as permanent imagery; and the liter- 
ary kinship which the workmanship bears to what is 
most excellent and shining in the great works of Greece, 
Rome, and Italy, as well as to Hebraic grandeur, helps 
to place the poem in that remoter air which is an asso- 
ciation of the mind with all art. No other English 
poem has a similar brilliancy, aloofness, and perfection 
as of something existing in another element, except the 
"Adonais." In it personal lyricism achieved the most 
impersonal of elegies, and mingled the fairest dreams 
of changeful imaginative grief with the soul's intellectual 
passion for immortality full-voiced. It is detached from 
time and place ; the hunger of the soul for eternity, which 
is its substance, human nature can never lay off; its liter- 
ary kinship is with what is most lovely in the idyllic 
melody of the antique; and, owing to its small scale and 
the simple unity of its mood, it gives forth the perpetual 
charm of literary form in great purity. These two 



248 THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 

poems stand alone with Shakespeare's plays, and are 
for epic and lyric what his work is for drama, the height 
of English performance in the cultivation of romance. 
Other poets must be judged to have attained excellence 
in romantic art in proportion as they reveal the quali- 
ties of Shakespeare, Milton and Shelley; for these three 
are the masters of romantic form, which, like the spirit 
of life proceeding from within outward, is the vital 
structure of English poetic genius. This internal power is 
also a principle of classic art in its antique examples; but 
academic criticism developed from them a hardened for- 
malism to which romantic art is related as the spirit of 
life to the death-mask of the past. Such pallor has from 
time to time crossed the features of English letters in a 
man or an age, and has brought a marble dignity, as 
to Landor, or the shadow of an Augustan elegance, as 
in the era of Pope; but it has faded and passed away 
under the flush of new life. Even in prose, in which 
so-called classic qualities are still sought by academic 
taste, the genius of English has shown a native obstinacy. 
The novel is so Protean in form as to seem amorphous, 
but essentially repeats the drama, and submits in its 
masters to Shakespearian parallelism; in substance and 
manner it has been overwhelmingly of a romantic cast; 
and in the other forms of prose, style, though of all 
varieties, has, perhaps, proved most preservative when 
highly colored, individualized, and touched with imagin- 
ative greatness, as in Browne, Taylor, Milton, Bunyan, 
Burke, Carlyle, Macaulay; but the inferiority of their 
matter, it should be observed, affects the endurance of 
the eighteenth century prose masters — Steele, Addison, 
Swift, and Johnson, to name the foremost. Commonly, 
it must be allowed, English, both prose and poetry, not- 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 249 

withstanding its triumphs, is valued for substance and 
not for form, whether this be due to a natural incapacity, 
or to a retardation in development which may hereafter 
be overcome, or to the fact that the richness of the 
substance renders the fineness of the form less eminent. 
In conclusion, the thought rises of itself, will this con- 
tinuity, assimilative power, and copiousness, this origi- 
nal genius, this serviceableness to civilization and the 
private life, this supreme romantic art, be maintained, 
now that the English and their speech are spread through 
the world, or is the history of the intellectual expansion 
of Athens and Rome, the moral expansion of Jerusalem, 
to be repeated? The saying of Shelley, "The mind in 
creation is a fading coal," seems to be true of nations. 
Great literatures, or periods in them, have usually marked 
the culmination of national power; if they "look before 
and after," as Virgil in the "iEneid," they gather their 
wisdom, as he too did, by a gaze reverted to the past. 
The paradox of progress, in that the laudator temporis 
acti is always found among the best and noblest of the 
elders, while yet the whole world of man ever moves 
on to greater knowledge, power, and good, continues like 
the riddle of the Sphinx; but time seems unalterably in 
favor of mankind through all dark prophecies. The 
mystery of genius is unsolved; and the Messianic hope 
that a child may be born unto the people always re- 
mains; but the greatness of a nation dies only with 
that genius which is not a form of human greatness in 
individuals, but is shared by all of the blood, and con- 
stitutes them fellow-countrymen. The genius of the 
English shows no sign of decay; age has followed age, 
each more gloriously, and whether the period that is now 
closing be really an end or only the initial movement 



2 50 



THE PRAISE OF ENGLISH BOOKS 



of a vaster arc of time, corresponding to the greater 
English destiny, world-wide, world-peopling, world-free- 
ing, the arc of the movement of democracy through the 
next ages — is immaterial ; so long as the genius of the 
people, its piety and daring, its finding faculty for truth, 
its creative shaping in art, be still integral and vital, 
so long as its spiritual passion be fed from those human 
and divine ideas whose abundance is not lessened, and 
on those heroic tasks which a world still half discovered 
and partially subdued opens through the whole range 
of action and of the intellectual and moral life — so 
long as these things endure, English speech must still 
be fruitful in great ages of literature, as in the past these 
have been its fountainheads. But if no more were to be 
written on the page of English, yet what is written there, 
contained and handed down in famous books and made 
the spiritual food of the vast multitude whose children's 
children shall use and read the English tongue through 
coming centuries under every sky, will constitute a moral 
dominion to which Virgil's line may proudly apply — 



His ego nee metas rerum nee tempora pono: 
Imperium sine fine dedi. 



TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 
HISTORICAL AND ESTHETIC 



Lectures delivered on the Larwill Founda- 
tion of Kenyon College, May seventh and 
eight, 1913 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 

What is the act of criticism? It has lately been 
succinctly described as a repetition of the creative act 
of genius originating a work of art; to criticise is to re- 
create. The critic is genius at one remove; he is not 
unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, 
as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only 
thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and 
having arrived at this, his task is done. This is the 
last word of modern theory. It is obvious that it simpli- 
fies the function of criticism, and relieves it apparently 
of much of its old service. It relieves it, for example, 
of judgment; the critic understands, he does not judge! 
It relieves it of interpretation; the critic presents, he 
does not interpret. Strictly speaking, it seems a private 
affair that he is engaged in, an appreciation within his 
own consciousness; for the public to benefit by this 
method, every one must become his own critic, since to 
create or re-create is a deeply personal act. I pass no 
judgment on this theory now, but I shall return to it 
in my second lecture and shall endeavor to draw out 
its fruitful side. I desire, however, to state it at the 
outset, in order to throw into relief against it the matter 
of the present discourse, which deals with an older con- 
ception of the critic's service. 

The theory whose main position I have outlined, 

253 



2 54 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

limits art narrowly to its own world, the esthetic sphere of 
the soul in which genius works and from which its creations 
proceed, a world transcending that in which human life 
habitually goes on, and existing by virtue of its ideality 
on a higher plane of being. The world of art has an 
absolute and eternal quality which it imparts to its crea- 
tions; and one feels this the more in proportion as he 
has intimacy with them, enters into and lives in their 
world, and achieves its reality by virtue of that union 
with the creative mind which the new theory sets forth 
as the end of criticism. But works of art have also 
a purely phenomenal side; once created, they belong to 
the world of phenomena, and having come into existence 
there, they are subject to the order of time, to current 
human conditions, to changing judgments intellectual and 
moral, to varieties of fortune; in short, they are no 
longer isolated and in a place of their own, the artist's 
mind, but are part of a larger world. They put on 
many relations, and thereby enlarge their being; they 
generate new interests, and thereby vary their signifi- 
cance; and the older criticism took note of these things. 
In brief, works of art take their place in time, and give 
rise to a history of art. They are terms of a temporal 
series; they "look before and after"; and however isolate 
and absolute may be their esthetic value, they offer to 
say the least, other pertinent phases of interest, when 
taken as a development in time. 

The older criticism concerned itself much with germi- 
nal origins and shaping influences, questions of race, 
climate, geographical position, social environment, polit- 
ical fortune. I need only recall to you the brilliant 
monographs in which Taine made the art of the North 
emanate from fog, shadow and damp, and the art of 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 255 

the South weave its being of sun, color and broad pros- 
pects, till it almost seemed that poetry was a branch of 
climatology, that temperature was race-temperament, 
war and commerce other names for epic and comedy, and 
genius rather a social phenomenon than a personal power. 
This resolution of facts into general causes, of particu- 
larity into law, of the individual into the mass, belonged 
to the bent of his mind, the mind of a philosopher; it 
is naturally irritating to those who find personality to 
be the fiery core of life; but his method brings out the 
distinguishing features, as wholes, of the artistic periods 
to which it is applied, maps as it were their local and 
temporal emergence as units of history, and displays on 
the background of the common milieu the group-traits 
of each country and age. Work of all kinds is the fruit 
of a partnership between man and the world. Taine's 
method brings into full view the world-factor, and by its 
emphasis and pre-occupation with this puts the objective 
element to the fore in the genesis of art. 

The balance is redressed by the psychologists, who, 
in turn putting the subjective element in the fore, show 
as ardent a will to be absorbed in personality as Taine 
to escape from it. To them the individual is all; and 
not only that, but what is most peculiar and sui generis 
in him, his idiosyncrasy, is idealized as the fount and 
substance of his genius. Often it would seem that his 
title to be reckoned among the sons of light is not clear 
till some abnormality is discovered in him. Criticism 
loses itself in biography and medicine, gossip, chatter 
and pathology; and of late that defective, delinquent 
degenerate, genius, seems hunted to his lair in the sub- 
conscious self. In recent years, too, there has sprung 
up a third group, a hybrid of the sociologists and the 



256 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

psychologists, which in the name of comparative litera- 
ture has constituted of the republic of letters an inter- 
national state in lieu of ordinary society, and has found 
its controlling factors in great personalities such as 
Petrarch, Rousseau, Goethe, and, secondary to them, a 
vast network of influences working between nations and 
epochs; and in the hands of these scholars criticism has 
become an anatomy of texts. 

In these various modern diversions and divagations, 
determined by the scientific spirit of the last century, 
criticism shows a temper analogous to that which at an 
earlier time in the scholastic world committed it to logic 
in the classification of the kinds of literature, epic, 
drama, lyric and the like and to rhetoric in the formu- 
lation of the rules. It is plain that in all such labors, 
ancient or modern, criticism gets ever further away from 
the work of art itself; it leaves the matter of life, which 
art is, for the matter of knowledge; and when we con- 
sider the extraordinary variety of the tasks which criti- 
cism latterly has set for itself, whatever their value and 
interest as matter of knowledge may be, it certainly 
seems time to ask whether there be not a more defined 
sphere, less confounded with all knowledge, for criticism 
to move in, and a peculiar function for that art to 
fulfil which in the hands of its great masters, the poets, 
has been an art of interpreting and manifesting life at 
its height of power in genius. 

Shall we, then, return to the new definition? To criti- 
cise is to re-create the work of art as it was in the mind 
of the original artist. But how to do this? It is a 
simple matter to re-create from what is before us, from 
the image or the text, "a vision of our own"; but to 
require that the vision be the same that was in the mind 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 257 

of the artist places it at once in the field of history; it 
is the state of mind of a man in the past, a particular 
man in his own time and place, that is to be recovered. 
What if the work of art be that of a race different in 
temperament, a Persian poem, for example? or one of an 
unfamiliar technique, like a Japanese print? or one of 
an antiquated dramatic habit and a primitive morality, 
such as an Aeschylean trilogy? It is true that in art 
there is a universal element that, broadly speaking, ap- 
peals to all minds that are capable of receiving it; but 
in successive times it is dressed in the trappings of its 
own age, and attended by local and temporal associa- 
tions, and though it may be interpreted in diverse 
tongues, it has a different tone and accent and offers a 
different signification in each. Just as it is necessary 
to read the language before one can understand the text, 
it is needful to endue the mind with various knowledge 
before it can take in foreign ideas and emotions in their 
original sense; and, indeed, if one would appropriate the 
past, as it was, he must put on the whole garment of 
time. The end given being to realize the state of mind of 
a man at a past moment — it may be in China or Peru — 
the office of historical criticism seems an indispensable 
preliminary; and by historical criticism I mean all 
those studies, sociological, psychological or comparative, 
which assist in the representation of the past, and amplify 
and clarify historical knowledge. They are essential 
preliminaries to that task of re-creating the work of art 
as it was in the mind of the original artist. The extent 
of this preparatory study, in each instance, depends 
upon the case in hand; but in any case the critic must 
know the artist and the world he lived in, to reproduce 
his mental states with precision, or even approximately, 



258 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

and this necessity bears the more heavily upon him in 
proportion to the presence in the work of art of what 
is alien in time, race and method. 

The injunction to re-create what was in the mind of 
the artist, when put forth with the implication that 
historical criticism can be dispensed with, derives its 
plausibility from the inveterate habit of the intellect of 
regarding life not as a perpetual flux, but as fixed. This 
is the mother of many practical fallacies. If there were 
only the European world and our own century, the maxim 
might work with sufficient success; but no sooner do we 
go about the world than we find other races and civili- 
zations with an art of their own which at first view is 
inscrutable to us; and no sooner do we, in our own 
studies, go out of our own time and retrace the course 
of our own civilization than we discover art which is 
equally unfamiliar and enigmatic to us, such as Byzan- 
tine mosaic, for example, and primitive art generally; 
and even in the literature of the past there is much which 
has little or no meaning to us. History, indeed, shows 
us our ancestors encountering successively alien litera- 
tures and appropriating them as they became gradually 
intelligible, and in each case a Renaissance attended the 
appropriation — a Celtic, Greek, Italian, Gothic Renais- 
sance. History unfolds such a flux, not merely of events 
and things in general, but of art in all its forms. But 
the intellect, in connection with its other systems of 
abstract thought conceived as fixed, has elaborated a 
logical scheme of art, in which all art is contained and 
is equally accessible to the mind. Art, however, is not 
thus known in the abstract like science, but only in the 
flux, in the concrete; that is its nature. 

What, you will say, "is not line the same beauty in 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 259 

a Greek or Japanese or French work? has not color the 
same value? is not the human eye the same the world 
over?" Well, to begin with, the line is not the same, 
and it has different connotations; and so, also, of the 
color; and the human eye is as various as the soul 
that sees through it. Art is not like mathematics, some- 
thing to be cast into identical formulas in every time and 
place. Art does not, like science, set forth a perma- 
nent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two 
factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in 
the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expres- 
sion; and both these factors are extremely variable. 
Furthermore, one does not make progress in art as one 
does in science, along a straight line as it were, with 
continual increase of knowledge, conserving always what 
was gained and adding to it, proceeding onward to higher 
branches. We foresee no limit to scientific advancement 
in the future, and in scientific truth there is nothing 
dead; science is always a living and growing body of 
knowledge; but art on the contrary has many times run 
its course to an end, and exhausted its vital power. The 
growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigor- 
ous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The 
periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, 
fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and 
sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or 
the school of Pope will serve as examples. The theme 
and the manner, the interest and the skill, are perpetu- 
ally changing from century to century and from country 
to country. There is immense variation also within the 
limit of any one group: in Greek sculpture, from the 
archaic figures of the gods to the molds of the Parthenon; 
^n Renaissance painting, from the primitives to the mas- 



2 6o TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

terpieces of the art. One can re-create what was in the 
mind of a mathematician a thousand years ago, recap- 
ture the truth of the intellect wherever it may have once 
come to light; but the image of art, that infinite variable 
of perception and expression in the individual — that 
is not easily re-created, at least, not with certainty and in 
its original fullness. To leave out of account the diffi- 
culties of understanding that arise in primitive and alien 
art, even in the case of that art where both ideas and 
expression are at their height of genius in our own civi- 
lization — for example, in Phidias and Michel Angelo — 
do you think it is a facile task to re-create the work as 
it was in the mind of the artist? It is not so simple 
as observing a sunset; it is not merely to open your 
eyes and see; you must first create the eye to see with. 

Is it not our experience that even with contemporary 
art of our own race there is much uncertainty in our 
vision? Do we not very often have different impres- 
sions, one from another, of characters in a novel or 
drama, a different music from the same poem? In the 
contents of our several minds regarding litreature and 
art in general there is no such agreement as in the case 
of mathematics or logic; and we are, after all, well aware 
that we, at best, accomplish only an approximation to 
what was in the mind of the original genius. Art is ex- 
pression; what is expressed is often the vision of a subtle 
and powerful soul, and also his experience with his vision ; 
and however vivid and skilful he may be in the means of 
expression, yet it is frequently found that the master- 
spell in his work is something felt to be indefinable and 
inexpressible. It is our instinct to be modest in the 
presence of great art, and rather to be grateful for so 
much of its meaning as may reach us than to flatter our- 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 261 

selves that we know it as it was in the artist's mind. 
If this is true of our own literature in our own time, 
how much more hardly shall we be persuaded that we 
see with the eyes of the old Anglo-Saxon wanderer, of 
troubador and mime and lyre-player, that we hear the 
nightingale like Hafiz and drink the wine-cup like Omar! 
It is often difficult to believe in the truth of political 
history as it is presented by this and that conflicting 
writer re-creating men and their actions. How much 
more contingent and unstable must seem this history of 
art, re-creating the thoughts of men, their imaginative 
visions, the spiritual intimations of the brooding life 
within them, their guesses, their hopes and fears — their 
souls! There is a history of art, a geography and cata- 
logue of it in time, biographical details and technical 
processes; but far more than in the case of political his- 
tory is it a shadow-picture of the past, a mere approxi- 
mation full of conjecture and mystery and blank gaps 
where time has done its perfect work. I do not care 
greatly for the history of art except as it exists in its 
surviving monuments, and I do not care for these pri- 
marily for their historical value; but I am sure that art, 
being as I have described it, a Protean play of person- 
ality in many places and ages, cannot be understood as 
it was in its original creation except by the full aid of 
historical criticism in all its forms; and even with that 
aid the recreation of art will prove still only a doubtful 
resurrection of the soul that has passed away — a por- 
trait, perhaps, but one in whose eyes and expression 
there is an unshared secret. 

I am not disposed to relinquish historical criticism; 
nay, rather I must cling to it as my only hope of quali- 
fying myself to undertake that purely esthetic criti- 



262 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

cism by which I may at last become one with the soul 
of the artist and see his vision with the meaning and 
atmosphere it had to himself. So much of art is antique 
and foreign, so much of what is racially our own has 
become alien to my feelings and ideas by the gradual 
detachment of time, that I need an interpreter between 
me and this dead and dying world of the past — I need 
precisely the interpretation of knowledge that historical 
criticism gives. True, it is not esthetic criticism; but 
esthetic criticism, in the sense of a re-creation of art as 
it was in the past, for me is impossible without it. 

In the same way that I cannot spare interpretation, 
I am reluctant also to excuse criticism from the function 
of judgment. It is said that the critic is concerned with 
two questions — "What was in the mind of the artist? 
Has he expressed it?" To reply to these is the whole of 
the critic's business. Here, again, the new theory nar- 
rowly limits the critic to the esthetic field. The inten- 
tion is to debar the critic from any inquiry into the na- 
ture of what was in the artist's mind, or any examination 
of the means of expression employed, or any judgment 
upon the value of the complete work. Whether the 
artist's intention was one proper to his art, whether his 
method was well or ill adapted to its material and proc- 
esses, whether the result was worth the pains, are ques- 
tions that can find no place. Granted the artist's aim, 
has he won success? and there an end. It is assumed, 
you observe, that there are no rules that are binding 
in the art, and that the artist himself is a man utterly 
free, without fealty or responsibility of any sort, of whom 
nothing is to be required except success in working his 
own will. Such freedom may belong to the esthetic 
world, and constitute, indeed, the normal condition of 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 263 

life there — the artist's life; but I find these assump- 
tions too sweeping when they are introduced into the 
world of criticism. I say nothing of works of art in the 
process of their creation, at present; but I repeat that, 
once created, they enter into the ordinary world of men 
and there they are subject to intellectual and moral 
values, being variously useful or harmful, as well as to 
analysis of their technique in the light of tradition. 
They have passed out of the artist's creative mind, and 
are part of the larger human world — a lower and differ- 
ent world, it may be, but one in which communal inter- 
ests and values have justly a great place, often to the 
detriment of the sporadic individual, though an artist. 
In the social world, if innovation has its privileges, tradi- 
tion has its rights. The rules of any craft grow out of 
experience; if an original and inventive artist finds novel 
ways, he does not, generally, altogether invalidate the 
old rules; most often he merely amends and improves 
them. The rules assume no finality; they embody past 
tradition, and incorporate new experience as soon as it 
has been warranted by success. It is true that genius 
is always breaking rules and with the happiest fortune; 
it is the critic's delight to be acknowledging instances 
of this constantly, for it means vitality and discovery; 
but breaking rules is not genius, and criticism does a 
very useful service generally, in such art as engraving, 
for example, in keeping under close observation the 
methods used or attempted, in the light of the tradition 
of the various crafts where hand and eye work together. 
Neither is success genius. It is still pertinent for criti- 
cism to inquire into the quality of the success, its value; 
and I am conservative enough to add that the critic 
may even ask whether it was right. Esthetic freedom 



264 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

is like free speech; it is, indeed, a form of free speech. 
We can never have too much of it. But the wisdom of 
what is said, the value of what is created — that is an- 
other matter; and we who find in the merely human 
world no guide so safe as reason, look to criticism to 
declare the judgment of reason on the intellectual and 
moral values of art. 

But has art any intellectual and moral values? Is it 
not altogether esthetic, a matter of sense-perception? 
does it not exist, as I have said, always in the flux, in 
the individual and concrete, in the phenomenal? how 
shall any abstract element, any pure concept, anything 
of the reason be found in that which is by definition a 
thing of the senses? The doctrine of the particularity 
of art is carried to this extreme, that the presence of 
the universal element, the reason, is denied in it. You 
may name a bronze statue Liberty, or a painted figure 
in a city hall Commerce, or a marble form in a temple 
Athene or Venus ; but what is really there is only a repre- 
sentation of a single woman. And, likewise, in all art 
and literature there are only single objects grouped in 
a purely phenomenal series, such as life presents to- us 
in its successive momentary flow. I do not see that art, 
in being phenomenal, escapes from the reason any more 
than life does, which is also phenomenal in the same 
sense. The faculties of the mind work on the material 
of art precisely as they work on the material of life. 
There is this difference, however, between the two worlds 
of life and art, that the former is a chance medley, an 
arrangement that happens, while the latter is an ar- 
rangement in which the higher faculties have intervened ; 
it is an intended arrangement. In the casual happen- 
ings of life we find tragedy and comedy, but in the art 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 265 

of the drama they have been freed from incongruous and 
confusing admixtures, and are seen in a purer form. 
Among the living we find beauty, but in the sculptures 
of the Parthenon it is unveiled to our eyes in a more 
apparent form. The intervention of genius has charged 
phenomena with something new, vital and transforming, 
namely, with its own personality. It is conceded, in 
the new theory, that the contents of the work of art, its 
meaning, is constituted of the artist's personality ex- 
pressed therein. What a lean and diminished person- 
ality that would be from which intellectual and moral 
elements were excluded! The difficulty appears to lie 
in finding a passage for intellectual and moral elements 
into that phenomenal and highly concrete world in which 
alone art is expressed. Can the gap between the ab- 
stract world of reason and the concrete world of sense 
be bridged? It appears to me that it is bridged in art 
precisely as it is in the normal exercise of our faculties 
in the routine of ordinary life. 

The concrete fact of experience is the base upon which 
the fabric of reason rests, for our faculties work only in 
conjunction with such experience; and I suppose no one 
would contest the liability of the world of art to be 
philosophized upon in common with other observed 
phenomena; but my contention goes further than that 
and maintains that the artist may express in his work 
what he designs others to draw from it in the way of v 
the intellect as well as in the way of the senses. It is 
obvious that the concrete object is habitually employed 
to express the abstract, by convention for example, as 
in the case of the flag, or of the attributes that charac- 
terize and designate the goddess, such as the doves of 
Venus. It is a closer connection that exists when the 



266 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

concrete is used, not symbolically, but as an illustration, 
in the case of the parable, for instance. The characters 
and events of the parable are entirely individual and 
particular ; but its content, its meaning, what it expresses, 
is a general truth or rule of life. The story is, in fact, 
no part of the meaning, but merely its organ of expres- 
sion. As one proceeds into the more complex forms of 
art, and into its higher realms, the part of the reason — 
that faculty which takes note of relations and identifies 
the universal — though it may be more subtle, is still 
engrossing; and to me, indeed, gives its soul to the work. 
It is true that the creative faculty has for its material 
means of expression only perceptions stored in memory, 
which it remolds and gives back' to the world changed 
and in a new arrangement of line, color and action, in 
statues, pictures, poems ; but in this remolding the higher 
powers of the mind have had a hand, and have planted 
in it their peculiar work. The creative faculty is not 
merely esthetic, or sense-perceiving; but it gathers into 
its energy the whole play of personality, and is a power 
of the total soul. The remolding of the world that 
takes place in the artist's soul and is expressed in his 
finished work is a new creation; it is not a mirror of what 
was, a return to the preexisting reality, a copy; it is a 
new world. Taken in its whole extent as the general 
world of art, it is a rationalized and spiritualized world, 
the world that ought to be, an ideal world, though found 
only fragmentarily in any individual or period or coun- 
try. Art is not a spontaneous generation and geyser, 
as it were, of the senses at play in their own world of 
mere phenomena; but it is a world-creator, the maker 
of a new and complete world, one not superficial and 
momentary merely, but a world with meaning, loaded 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 267 

with all the significance that man has found in his 
spiritual life. 

Were art indeed to shrink to the merely phenomenal, 
how would it lose its great place in the thoughts of men! 
So far from being the filmy material of the senses, we 
have long looked on it as the spiritual substance of the 
past. Men and kingdoms, civilizations, pass away; but 
they have left a monument in their arts, and especially 
in the fine arts they have stamped an imprint of their 
souls — their earthly immortality. Athens passes from 
barbarian to barbarian, but on the crest of the Acropolis, 
and in the world-blown leaves of the Academy, Greek 
genius survives. Rome piles ruin over ruin on the 
Capitol, but Virgil stands free of mortal decay. Art 
that is so deathless can derive its vigor only from the 
spirit itself. Genius is that in which the soul of a race 
burns at its brightest, revealing and preserving its vision ; 
works of art are great and significant in proportion to 
the clarity and fullness with which they incarnate this 
vision. That is the doctrine which we have believed. 
What art expresses and records is the spiritual truth of 
the past as it was perceived and embodied by the most 
highly gifted among nations. It is not meant that the 
artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the 
scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher. 
He has his own way, none too clear even to himself, by 
which he becomes the typical soul of his race, embodying 
its convictions, hopes and despairs, in his sympathetic 
and assimilating personality; and in expressing himself, 
he stamps an image of the Greek or Persian or Italian 
soul in his epoch. It is a commonplace that all creative 
art proceeds by a principle of selection, which takes from 
the store of memory what is appropriate to the work in 



268 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

hand; into this principle of selection, which is the guide, 
enter race-instincts, beliefs, preferences, varieties of 
special knowledge, local and temporal interests and much 
else which the artist has in community with his people, 
and by virtue of this he is representative of them. The 
intellectual and moral habit of the race and its spiritual 
outlook are a part of this common endowment. The 
artist need not be himself a thinker; he will, nevertheless, 
embody the thoughts of his time. He absorbs civiliza- 
tion, and he may give it out unconsciously, obeying the 
instinctive choices that belong to his personality, with- 
out any distinct volition. I am far from maintaining 
that an artist realizes the truth he expresses; but it is in 
his work with or without his consent. He does not arrive 
at it, as ordinary thinkers do, by discursive reasoning, 
formulate it, and so include it in his work; his processes 
are more rapid and vital. We are accustomed to call 
them intuitive and inspirational; but whatever the 
process is, the spiritual truth remains the same. He 
does not state it either, as ordinary thinkers do, ab- 
stractly; he places it before us, as we say, in the life 
itself — a statue, a painting, a poem. It is not the less 
intellectual and moral truth, spiritual truth, because it 
is presented in a marble pediment, a frescoed nave or an 
acted drama. Gravitation is not the less scientific truth 
because it is manifest in a falling body or a revolving 
system instead of in a mathematical formula. There 
is a difference in the form of statement between con- 
crete and abstract; but truth is one and the same in 
both. In science the truth is knowledge; in art the 
truth is life. General truth enters into art, it seems 
to me, though under a different guise from that it wears 
in science, with equal ease and certainty and in a more 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 269 

vivid form; and though it by no means enters always 
and at all times into art, yet great art commonly owes 
its significance to the presence in it of such truth. 

Perhaps I should amplify and bring out more in de- 
tail the distinction between art and nature and their 
several worlds. Nature exists in a fixed order with 
which man can interfere only slightly, and then only 
in strict dependence on and in alliance with natural law, 
as, for example, by cutting canals, cultivating soils, fell- 
ing forests. Nature, however, when it enters into the 
mind as a picture, is much more plastic — so much 
so, indeed, that the inner world of each one of us is, 
in some respects, peculiar to himself. Each of us elim- 
inates much from notice and organizes what he pre- 
serves in a fashion of his own. The artist has such a 
world of his own — a vision constituted of what he has 
seen and cared for, of what was significant to him; but 
in this inner world of memories there is no such fixity 
and order, no such unalterable necessity, as exists in 
the natural world; it can be reconstituted in the mind, 
and thus is created a new world, a better world it may 
be, which the artist embodies in his work. He does not 
express, indeed, his whole inner world; but he gives us 
in his art fragments of it, phases and moments, which 
seem to him its most interesting parts. Thus Plato gave 
us the "Republic" and the "Laws," an ideal state framed 
by himself, like nothing that ever was. Thus the Greek 
sculptors gave us that "marble race of gods and men," 
a perfection of physical and moral beauty that had never 
been visible before to men's eyes; and the Greek poets 
gave in epic, tragedy and lyric a vision of practical, 
ethical and emotional life, which for clarity, profundity 
and charm had not before existed. Greek art, taken 



270 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

all together, seems to re-create the race anew. Simi- 
larly, Christian art in its medieval and Renaissance 
masterpieces of architecture, painting and music seemed 
to re-create the human spirit anew; and in modern times 
the landscape painters seem to have re-created the ex- 
ternal world — light, space, color — anew. Art, you 
observe, is not a reproduction; the reality that remains 
in it out of the world that was, is only a residuum; the 
characteristic part, the vital and illuminating part, is 
what the artist has brought new-born in his own soul — 
that which never was before. Necessity is our lot in 
nature; the world of art is the place of the spirit's free- 
dom; there the soul criticises the world, accepts and 
rejects it, amends it, has its own will with it as if it 
were clay, and remakes it; and the image thus remade 
in his spirit returns to the external world in the form 
of the completed work of art. Art is the place of the 
soul's freedom; there it forges its dream, unhampered; 
there, age after age, race after race, it gives its dream to 
the world that is. It is not singular that men should 
exalt the sphere of art as being the highest grade of 
man's being, and hold in profound and long reverence 
what is elaborated there, and celebrate its great masters 
as the heirs of an eternal fame; for it is in that sphere 
that the growth of the human spirit goes on, that its new 
revelations and enlightenments occur, that its spiritual 
progress lies. What would the centuries behind us be 
without the antique beauty, the Christian glory, the 
continuing life of art in poetry and music? Material 
civilization would, indeed, remain — wealth, transporta- 
tion, communication, mechanical crafts, the toil of the 
land and the sea; but the soul would have no annals. 
It is because art is the place of the soul's vitality that it 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 271 

has been so cherished and jealously preserved by the mas- 
ter-races and the master-spirits of every race. The soul 
has written its history in art, and there it still writes its 
aspirations, insights and accomplishments, embodying its 
visions in its works. 

Such, it seems to me, is the prime contrast between 
art and nature — an opposition of freedom to necessity, 
of the soul to the body, of spirituality to materialism. 
Art is the soul's confession. I should be ill-content if 
works of art, taken individually, yielded to the critic 
only a momentary experience of the senses and the feel- 
ings, as if they were merely disparate objects of nature. 
I desire to know their meaning to the soul; and that 
intellectual and moral elements enter into their meaning, 
and that without the cooperation of the reason they are 
incompletely known, seems to me plain. The singular 
thing about the records of the soul's life is their great 
diversity in different countries and epochs, their lack 
of progressive coherence, their reflection of life from 
various and multiform facets. Art, as I have said, seems 
to have its career in limited and comparatively brief 
cycles, dissociated and disconnected one from another. 
Each school, each age, each race has its own art, often 
highly individualized and peculiar to itself. Genius has 
an eruptive character; it appears, discharges and expires, 
with no apparent law; each race, in respect to its genius, 
is a variable star — it burns and fades and burns again. 
The diversity of art not only makes interpretation neces- 
sary to its understanding, but also renders judgment of 
its value, intellectual, moral, technical, very useful, both 
in guiding the mind in its choice and in establishing the 
relative place that any particular artist or art period has 
in the whole field. It is the extraordinary intellectual 



272 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

and moral value of Greek art, as well as its fine esthetic 
quality, that gives supreme importance to its works; and 
the same thing holds true of English, Italian and French 
literature. Contemplation without judgment is a barren 
attitude. It is not necessary that judgment should be 
of the comparative rank of this or that, higher or lower, 
or of its legitimacy or illegitimacy. Judgment is not 
of one sort, but various; it may not even be explicit, 
but may reside in the degree and quality of the pleasure 
or pain felt in the presence of art; but, whatever be its 
particular subject or mode of statement, some judgment 
disclosing the worth of the work of art seems to me 
not only appropriate, but an essential part of the critic's 
service. If art is to be known historically — and that 
is clearly the meaning of the injunction to re-create 
works of art as they were in the minds of the original 
maker — then criticism must be both historical and 
judicial; it must re-create the past in environment and 
temperament, and it must analyze the contents of art, 
in any particular case, to discover its worth. 

The revolt against historical and judicial criticism, the 
attempt to confine the critic to an act of contemplation 
or simple intuition and whatever may result from that 
in his mind, in the belief that he will thus repeat what 
was in the mind of the artist, springs, I think, from a 
discontent with that immersion in the dead past of 
knowledge which is often the scholar's lot, and from a 
desire to confine our interest in art within those limits 
where art is alive. I sympathize with this discontent 
and this desire. It is true that in historical criticism 
the mind travels far from the work of art itself, and 
makes a long detour through biography and social and 
political history; and often it arrives at its true task 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM 273 

only through linguistics and archeology. This is weari- 
some, especially if one is really interested in art and let- 
ters. It is true also that in analyzing the contents of 
epic and drama, tales of chivalry, Eastern fables and 
Northern sagas, the mind is dealing often with dead 
intellect and dead morals, with antiquated methods, with 
what was inchoate in the primitive and decaying in the 
overripe; in a word, with what belongs in the tomb 7 
from which as a matter of fact much of it comes. But 
that is the lot of the scholar. "My days among the 
dead are passed," is the inscription over his Inferno. 
But if one insists on re-creating in his own mind pre- 
cisely what was in the mind of the original artist — or, 
since that is confessedly hopeless, on approximating that 
ideal as closely as possible — then, I see no help for it. 
History is a thing of the dead past. It is an embalm- 
ment, wearing a mummified resemblance to life. Many 
are the voices in our time, beginning with Emerson, that 
have cried, "Away with it!" "Let us sweep our houses 
clean of death," they say, "and have only life for a 
housemate." There is a group of young men in Italy 
who advocate the destruction of the art of the past 
there; they say that it is in the way. If anything in 
the past is worth preserving, surely it is the history of 
the soul, and if any history is worth knowing, it is that 
history. Any pains that any scholar may be put to, 
in acquiring that knowledge, is worth while; but, after 
all, death enters also into the history of the soul, and 
much that is recorded there is no longer vital, no longer 
of this world. Yet it is true in realizing the dead selves 
of mankind, the soul accumulates power, breadth of out- 
look, tolerance and especially, I think, faith and hope. 
The scholar who accumulates in himself the human past 



274 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

has something of that wisdom which goes, in individual 
life, with a long memory. This is the service of histori- 
cal criticism, that it stores and vivifies memory: it is a 
great service, and I would not dispense with it; but, 
especially in the world of art, which is the most intense 
realm of life, one is often fain to ask — "Is there no 
rescue from this reign of death, which is history, and 
how shall it be accomplished?" 



II 

ESTHETIC CRITICISM 

Is it an error to relegate art to the dead past and 
translate it into history? Works of art are not like 
political events and persons; they do not pass at once 
away. The Hermes of Praxiteles is still with us. Is 
it really the same Hermes that it was when it was made? 
Is its personal identity a fixed state, or does its per- 
sonality, like our own, change in the passage of time? 
May it not be the nature of art to cast off what is 
mortal, and emancipate itself from the mind of its crea- 
tor? Is it truly immortal, still alive, or only a stone 
image forever the same — a petrifaction, as it were, of 
the artist's soul at a certain moment? or is it possible, 
on the other hand, that such a life really abides in art 
as to make what is immortal in the work greatly exceed 
that mortal and temporary part which historical criti- 
cism preserves? Let us ignore the historical element, 
and consider what is left in the critical act, still con- 
ceived as a re-creation of the image, but the re-creation 
of the image before us apart from any attempt to realize 
what was in the artist's mind, or with only a passing 
reference to that. 

Expression is the nucleus of the artist's power. What 
is expression? It is the process of externalizing what 
was in the artist's mind, in some object of sense which 
shall convey it to others. The material used may be 

275 



276 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

actual form and color, as in painting and sculpture; 
or imaginary objects and actions through the medium 
of language, as in literature; or pure sound, as in music: 
always there is some material which is perceived by the 
senses and intelligible only through their mediation. 
Slight, indeed, would be the artist's power and inept 
his skill, if he should not so frame the lineaments of 
his work as to stamp on the senses of all comers the same 
intelligible image, and give for the bodily eye what the 
bodily eye can see in picture, statue or story. The work 
of art, however, is not merely the material object, but 
that object charged with the personality of the artist. 
It is in his power to make that charge effective that 
his true faculty of expression lies. The material object 
— form, color, action, sound — is enveloped in his feel- 
ing; the words he uses are loaded with his meanings and 
tones. His personality is immaterial, and cannot be 
bodied forth; hence, the most essential and significant 
part of what he expresses, that which clothes the material 
object with its spirituality, is dependent in a supreme 
degree on suggestion, on what can be only incompletely 
set forth, on half-lights and intimations, and the thou- 
sand subtleties which lie on the borderland of the in- 
expressible. 

In so far as a work of art is a thing of nature, it can be 
expressed materially with the more adequacy; in so far as 
it is a thing of the spirit, of personality, it is less subject 
to complete and certain expression; and in all art there are 
these two elements. In that process of re-creating the 
image which we are now examining the mind's fortune 
with these two elements is unequal; so far as the ma- 
terial part is concerned, normal eyes will see the same 
thing, normal intelligence will grasp the same thing, 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 277 

in figure, action and event; but when it is a question 
of realizing the spirit, differences begin to emerge and 
multiply. Rifts of temperament and varieties of ex- 
perience between artist and spectator make chasms of 
misunderstanding and misappreciation. How diverse 
are the representations in the mind finally, as revealed 
in our tastes and judgments! The same image, mir- 
rored in individuals, becomes radically different in op- 
posed minds, and each is apt to believe that his own 
is the true and only one. It is commonplace that every 
reader thinks that he is Hamlet. What a number of 
Hamlets that makes! It is a commonplace also that 
this ease of identification with a character is a test of 
genius in a writer and ranks him in power and signifi- 
cance. Those who create so are called the universal 
writers. Whence arises this paradox, so common in 
art, of infinite diversity in identity? It comes from the 
fact that, so far from realizing the image as it was in 
the artist's mind and receiving it charged with his per- 
sonality merely, it is we ourselves who create the image 
by charging it with our own personality. In this crea- 
tion we do not simply repeat in ourselves his state of 
mind and become as it were ghosts of him who is 
dead; but we originate something new, living and our 
own. There is no other way for us to appropriate his 
work, to interpret it and understand it. The fact is that 
a work of art, being once created and expressed, ex- 
ternalized, is gone from the artist's mind and returns to 
the world of nature; it becomes a part of our external 
world, and we treat it precisely as we treat the rest of 
that world, as mere material for our own artist-life which 
goes on in our own minds and souls in the exercise of our 
own powers in their limitations. Our appropriation of 



278 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

art is as strictly held within these bounds as is our grasp 
upon the material world. 

It is one of the charms of art that it is not to be com- 
pletely understood. In an age in which so high a value 
is put upon facts, information, positive knowledge, it 
is a relief to have still reserved to us a place apart where 
it is not necessary to know all. The truth of science is 
stated in a formula of mathematics, a law of physics, a 
generalization of one or another kind; it is clear, and 
it is all contained there; in each specific case there is 
nothing more to be known. The truth of art is of a 
different sort; it does not seem to be all known, finished 
and finally stated, but on the contrary to be ever grow- 
ing, more rich in significance, more profound in sub- 
stance, disclosing heaven over heaven and depth under 
depth. The greatest books share our lives, and grow 
old with us; we read them over and over, and at each 
decade it is a new book that we find there, so much has 
it gained in meaning from experience of life, from ripen- 
ing judgment, from the change of seasons in the soul. 
The poetry of Wordsworth is a typical instance of such 
a book. It is the same with the artists, with sculp- 
tors and musicians. Art of all sorts has this lifelong 
increment of value, and whoever has experienced this 
easily realizes to what a degree and how constantly the 
reader's intelligence, cultivation and experience are con- 
trolling and limiting factors in his power to appropriate 
what is before him. In art he appropriates only a part 
of what the work contains. It is thus that the great 
artists, Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, are lifelong studies. 

A second but powerful limitation lies in those differ- 
ences of temperament, just referred to, which have an 
arbitrary potency in appreciation. The practical man 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 279 

is, as a rule, really self-excluded from the field of art; 
but, inside the field, the stoic will not make much of 
Byron nor the cynic of Shelley. In certain arts, such 
as the many kinds of prints, a special training of the eye 
and some technical knowledge of processes must be ac- 
quired before one really sees what the eye itself must 
discover in the engraving in order to apprehend its 
subtle qualities. The way, however, is most commonly 
blocked by certain inhibitions which are so lodged in 
the mind by education and opinion that they effectively 
paralyze any effort at re-creation. I remember once, 
years ago, when I was myself a student, meeting on a 
western train out of Buffalo a clergyman who kindly 
engaged me in conversation; and I, being but a boy, 
repaid his interest by flooding him with my enthusiasms 
for George Eliot and Scott, who happened to be then 
my ascendant stars. I recall well his final reply: 
"Young man," he said, "I never read anything that isn't 
true." What an inhibition that was, in his literary and 
artistic career ! I have since wondered if he found much 
to read. Ideal truth, as you perceive, had never dawned 
upon his mind — and that is the finer and happier part 
of truth. The prejudice of the early New England 
church against the theater is a curious instance of an 
inhibition that rendered nugatory a great historic branch 
of art, the drama; and it is the more singular, viewed as 
a religious phenomenon, because of the great place the 
drama held in religion itself in Catholic countries and 
especially in medieval times. What Puritan could read 
the sacred drama of Spain with any understanding? I 
have friends who object to war as a theme of verse, and 
the praise of wine by the poets is anathema in many 
quarters. These are all examples of moral inhibitions 



280 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

bred in the community and operating against great divi- 
sions of literature. What a sword of destruction that 
would be which would strike Mars and Bacchus from 
the world's poetry! The American inhibition, however, 
which best illustrates what I have in mind, is that which 
rejects the nude in sculpture and painting, not only for- 
feiting thereby the supreme of Greek genius and sanity, 
but to the prejudice, also, of human dignity, as it seems 
to me. Such inhibitions in one way and another exist in 
communities and individuals; the appreciation of litera- 
ture, and of art in general, is subject to them; and I cite 
these examples to bring out clearly how true it is that, 
almost involuntarily and unconsciously, in re-creating 
the work of art we remake it in ourselves and not in 
its own old world, and the meaning we charge it with 
is our own personality and not that of its original crea- 
tor. If I look with shamed eyes at Hermes, Narcissus 
and Venus, the shame is mine, and not the sculptor's; 
if I cannot read the old verses on Agincourt with sym- 
pathy and delight in their heroic breath, the poverty of 
soul is mine, not Drayton's. In every way, the 
responsibility for what we make of art, in re-creating 
it, springs from what we are. 

It is plain that, in consequence of our various limita- 
tions in faculty, knowledge, experience, temperament 
and working always with some subjection to communal 
ideas and tastes, we must suffer many losses of what 
the work of art originally contained and fall short of 
realizing it as it was in the artist's mind. On the 
other hand there is some compensation in the fact 
that the work itself may take on new meanings that 
the artist did not dream of; for, in returning to the 
external world and becoming a part of our real environ- 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 281 

ment, the work of art has resumed that plastic quality 
which belongs to the world of nature and makes it 
material for us to mold our own souls in. The es- 
sence of the work, its living power for us, is not what 
the artist put in it, but what we draw from it; its world- 
value it not what it was to the artist, but what it is to the 
world. It is common enough for the reader to find 
meanings in a book that the writer did not consciously 
put there; there is much in personality that the artist 
himself is not aware of, and also there may be much 
in the work which he does not attend to, and hence there 
is excess of significance in both ways; and moreover, the 
reader may respond to the work with greater sensitive- 
ness than belonged to the creator and in new ways. 
Thus arises the paradox which I often maintain, that it is 
not the poet, but the reader, who writes the poem. 

This is more plainly seen when literature is looked 
at under the changing lights of time. New ages appro- 
priate the works of the past by accomplishing a partial 
transformation in them, and unless art is capable of such 
a remaking, it cannot last; it becomes merely archaic, 
historic, dead — a thing for the scholar's museum. 
Homer has delighted ages, but it is through his capacity 
to live again in the battle-loving and travel-loving hearts 
of men; it is not because later generations have read the 
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey" as the Greeks read or heard 
them. Each age reads something into the text, as we 
say, and this "reading-in" is incessant in the history of 
art. It is well illustrated in the criticism of Pater, so 
frequently called creative criticism, and especially in his 
"Marius, the Epicurean," — a marvelous blend of the 
modern spirit with ancient material — but such "read- 
ing-in" is his most brilliant achievement in all his essays, 



282 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

whether they treat of Greek gods, like Dionysus, or 
French gallants, or Roman gentlemen; all his figures 
are developed in the dark chamber of his own singularly 
sensitive and refined artistic temperament. The same 
phenomenon occurs as characteristically, though in so 
contrasted a way, in the Puritan rehabilitation of the 
Old Testament at the time of the Civil War, when Agag 
and Naboth and their lives served as the eternal pattern 
of the ideal for the Roundheads; and at the present 
day one often hears in orthodox churches a discourse 
which, so far as its figures and colors are concerned, 
always reminds me of antique tapestry and seems to 
belong to some Oriental art of expression rather than 
to our own tongue, manners and ideas. Literature, and 
indeed all art, has this magic to change the meaning 
without altering the signs. It was thus that the pictur- 
esque and mythologic side of Paganism, the poetic part, 
was taken up, absorbed and reembodied in the Cathol- 
icism of southern Europe, and lives to this day, little 
changed in outward seeming, by the old Mediterranean 
shores. Indeed, in much modern poetry I often find 
the necessity of translating the old signs into fresh mean- 
ings in order to keep the language alive to me. Poetic 
imagery is none too abundant, take it all together; we 
cannot afford to sacrifice much of it. Instead of abolish- 
ing battle and the wine-cup, the gods and the heroes, 
the Old Testament, and what not, it will be far wiser to 
use them in the service of our new ideals. Art, taken 
either as a language or in its individual works, has not 
one meaning, but many. This is a part of the poet's 
subtle mystery that he declares he knows not what. 

If you have followed these remarks with any sym- 
pathy and I have conveyed to you my belief that each 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 283 

of us has the artist-soul, continually engaged in its own 
creations, you will readily comprehend that works of 
art are not to me historical monuments valuable for the 
information they give of the past, nor even artistic en- 
tities to be known apart from ourselves and as they were 
in the artist's mind; but rather such works are only raw 
material, or at least new material, for us to make our 
own statues and pictures and poems out of; or, in a 
word, to create the forms of our own souls out of; for 
the soul must be given forms in order to be aware of 
its being, to know itself, truly to be. The soul moves 
toward self-expression in many ways, but in finding 
forms for itself the soul discovers its most plastic ma- 
terial in the world of art. It is in forms of ideality that 
the soul hastens to clothe itself; and while it is possible 
for us to elaborate such forms from the crude mass of 
nature, as the first artists did, yet later generations are 
the more fortunate in that they possess in art and litera- 
ture a vast treasure of ideality already elaborated and 
present. Works of art thus constitute a select material 
wherein the artist-soul that is in each of us can work, 
not only with our own native force of penetration and 
aspiration, but, as it were, with higher aid — the aid 
of genius, the aid of the select souls of the race. It is 
true that the re-creation of old art which we accom- 
plish is our own personal act, and cannot be otherwise; 
but the way is made easier for us, doors are opened, 
directions are indicated, light is shed on forward and 
unknown paths, sympathy, guidance and courage are 
given to us by companionship with the works of those, 
our forerunners, who have lived long in the soul's own 
world and left their testimony for us so far as we have 
skill to read in their text and understand in their spirit. 



284 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

This is the true service of art — of the poets, painters, 
musicians — to prepare the material of the soul's life 
so that those who are less fortunately endowed and more 
humble may more readily put on the spiritual garment 
that all must wear if they are to be souls, indeed, and 
live above the bodily sphere. There are other ways than 
art, it is true, by which the soul comes into its own; but 
in the way of art it is by re-creating in ourselves the 
past forms of the spirit, vitally appropriating them and 
charging them with our own life, that we win most di- 
rectly and happily to true self-knowledge of the wonder- 
ful creature that man is. 

It has become plain, I trust, in what sense it is indeed 
true that it is the nature of art to cast off what is mortal 
and emancipate itself from the mind of its creator, and 
thus to enter upon a life of its own, continually renewed 
in the minds of those who appropriate it. This is its 
real immortality — not the fact that it lasts through 
time, but that it lives in the souls of mankind. I am 
fond of biography, and few are the pleasures of the 
literary life that are more pure and precious than the 
quiet and unknown companionship which biography may 
establish between ourselves and those whose works have 
endeared to us their persons and interested us in their 
human fortunes as if they were friends ; but I am always 
glad when time has destroyed all merely mortal record 
of them, and there remains only their work — only the 
"souls of poets dead and gone." It is only when fame 
shrinks to that narrow limit of the book or the deed, 
that it rises to its height. The Greek Anthology is a 
book of pure immortality because it has brought down 
with it so little of the alloy of temporal personality; 
and that clarity of fame, which seems almost a pecul- 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 285 

iarity of classical literature and antique art, gathering all 
its luster often into one lonely name, is due, perhaps, 
most to this freedom from human detail. The poet, the 
sculptor, has come to live only in his work, where the 
immortal part of him found expression and lodgment 
while he was yet alive; all else was dust, and is in the 
tomb which is appointed for mortal things. It is better 
so, when the poet's memory itself becomes ideal, and the 
imagination paints its Dante and carves its Shelley after 
the image of the pure soul they left on earth when they 
departed hence. Even that soul, that personality which 
they incarnated in their art, suffers changes and refine- 
ment. Only that element abides which can enter con- 
tinuously and permanently into the souls of men, accord- 
ing to their several grades of being — only that which 
can live in humanity; the rest fades away with time. 
And then this miracle arises that into the soul of Virgil, 
for example, enters a Christian soul, new-born, and 
deepening its pathos; and not Virgil only, but many 
others, are, as it were, adopted into the race itself and 
become the ever growing children of the human spirit, 
ideals and fathers of ideals through ages. That is 
earthly immortality — the survival and increment of the 
spirit through time. Thus arises another paradox, that 
as art begins by being charged with personality, it ends 
by becoming impersonal, solving the apparent contra- 
diction in the soul universal, the common soul of man- 
kind. Each of us creates art in his own image — it 
seems an infinite variable; and yet it is the variable of 
something identical in all — the soul. I often think that 
in the artistic life, and its wonderful spiritual interchange 
through the re-creation in each of the ideals of all, there 
is realized something analogous to the religious concep- 



286 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

tion of the communion of saints, especially when one 
considers the impersonality of art in its climax of world- 
fame; for the communion of saints is not a communion 
of individual with individual, but of each one with all. 
It is thus in the artistic life that one shares in the soul 
universal, the common soul of mankind, which yet is 
manifest only in individuals and their concrete works. 
Art like life has its own material being in the concrete, 
but the spiritual being of both is in the universal. 

We have come, then, in our examination of criticism, 
or, in other words, of the act of appreciation, to the 
point I indicated earlier upon opening the subject, where 
criticism appears to be a private affair, a deeply personal 
act, such that every one of us must be his own artist. 
Each of us has the artist-soul, and if we enter truly into 
the world of art, it is not merely as spectators, but as 
participants, as ourselves the artists. It is on this ac- 
tivity of the soul in its artist-life that the whole subject 
concentrates its interest. I reminded you that from 
time to time in history our ancestors encountered suc- 
cessively alien literatures, and as each was in turn appro- 
priated, a Renaissance resulted. It is thus that civiliza- 
tion has grown in body and quality, ever enriching itself 
by what it absorbs from this and that particular race 
and age. Nothing can exceed in folly the policy and 
temper that would isolate nations and races one from 
another; it is from the intermingling of all, with their 
various gifts and labors, that the greatest good finally 
comes; and no sign of the times is so disturbing to me 
as the present reactionary tendency in America appar- 
ent in the growth of race-prejudice and a jealous con- 
tempt of the foreigner. In this respect the life of the 
individual is like that of nations. If he grows, it is 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 287 

often by a Renaissance attending the introduction of 
something novel into his life. You are all familiar with 
the splendid burst of the human spirit which attended 
the re-discovery of the ancient classic world in Italy, 
and you will recall how at a later time the re-discovery 
of the Middle Ages occasioned a similar flowering of art 
in the Gothic Renaissance, so variously fruitful in its 
turn in the last century. The parallel is easily found 
in individual life; such a profound and developing ex- 
perience was the Italian journey for Goethe, the study 
of Plato and the Greek dramatists for Shelley, mythology 
for Keats — and everywhere in literary biography one 
finds illustrations. 

The most arresting trait of the artist-life, as one 
begins to lead it, is that it is a life of discovery. It is 
not truth that is discovered, but faculty; what results is 
not an acquisition of knowledge, but an exercise of in- 
ward power. The most wonderful thing in the soul is 
the extraordinary latency of power in it; and it is in 
the artist-life, in the world of art, that this latent power 
is most variously and brilliantly released. What hap- 
pens to you when you begin to see, really to see, pic- 
tures, for example? It is not that a new object has come 
within the range of your vision ; but that a new power of 
seeing has arisen in your eye, and through this power 
a new world has opened before you — a world of such 
marvels of space, color and beauty, luminosity, shadow 
and line, atmosphere and disposition, that you begin to 
live in it as a child begins to learn to live in the natural 
world. It is not the old world seen piece-meal; it is a 
new world on another level of being than natural exist- 
ence. So, when you begin to take in a poem, it is not 
a mere fanciful arrangement of idea and event added 



288 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

to your ordinary memory of things; new powers of feeling 
have opened in your heart that constitute a fresh pas- 
sion of life there, and as you feel it with lyric and drama, 
a significance, a mystery, a light enter into the universe 
as you know it, with transforming and exalting power. 
To the lover of pictures the visible world has become 
something other than it was — even nature herself 
flowers with Corots and Manets, coruscates with Turners 
and Claudes, darkens with Rembrandts; to the lover of 
poetry also the visible world has suffered change and 
lies in the light of Wordsworth or of Shelley, but much 
more the invisible world of inward life is transformed 
into visions of human fate in Aeschylus and Shakespeare, 
into throbs of passion in Dante and Petrarch, into cries 
of esctasy and pain in how many generations of the 
poets world-wide. It is not that you have acquired 
knowledge ; you have acquired heart. To lead the artist- 
life is not to look at pictures and read books; it is to 
discover the faculties of the soul, that slept unknown 
and unused, and to apply them in realizing the depth 
and tenderness, the eloquence, the hope and joy, of the 
life that is within. It is by this that the life of art 
differs from the life of science: its end is not to know, 
but to be. The revolt against the historical treatment of 
art arises from feeling that in such treatment art loses 
its own nature, and that what is truly life, and has its 
only value as life, is degraded into what is merely 
knowledge. I appreciate the worth and function of 
knowledge, and join with Tennyson in recognition of 
her rightful realm, but add with him — 

"Let her know her place; 
She is the second, not the first." 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 289 

The first place is held by life. It is against the substi- 
tution of knowledge for life in scholarship, especially in 
the literary and artistic fields, that the protest is made. 

A second main trait of the artist-life of the soul, for 
which I am, as it were, pleading, is that it is a life of 
growth by an inward secret and mysterious process. 
There is nothing mechanical in it; it is vital. It was 
this aspect of the soul's life which Wordsworth brought 
so prominently forward, and made elemental in his verse, 
advocating a "wise passiveness" in the conduct of the 
mind: 

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
Of things forever speaking, 
That nothing of itself will come, 
But we must still be seeking?" 

"Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, 
neither do they spin." That is the type of the artist- 
soul; in the artist-life there is neither toiling nor spin- 
ning. In an economical civilization like ours, leisure is 
apt to be confounded with indolence, and it is hard to 
see how the poet watching 

"the sun illume 
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom," 

is not an idler in the land. Especially is it hard to see 
how things will come without planning. In our own day 
planning has become an all-engrossing occupation. A 
belief in organization has spread through the country, 
and is applied in all quarters of life, as if success were 
always a matter of machinery, and preferably of legis- 
lative machinery. Even in the churches, which have 
been the home of spiritual force, organization plays an 



2 go TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

ever increasing part, as if failure in driving-force could 
be made up for by appliances in the machine; to a certain 
extent this is possible, but the driving force is not the 
machine. The practical reason so occupies all the field 
of our life that the result is to belittle and destroy what- 
ever has not its ground of being in the useful. Art, by 
its own nature, excludes the useful. Art, in its creative 
process, discards the instrumentality of means to an 
end, in the sense of planning and intention; its process is 
inspirational, as we say — a secret and mysterious 
growth. The artist, in generating his work — the poem, 
statue, picture — does not plan it; it comes to him. 
And when we, in our turn, look at what he has figured, 
or read what he has expressed, we do not plan what the 
result — the re-creation — will be in us; one of the 
most precious qualities of art is the divine surprise that 
attends its reception and realization in ourselves. There 
is a part of life where planning, the adjustment of means 
to an end, organization, and all that belongs in the prac- 
tical sphere, has its place; but the growth of the soul 
proceeds on other principles and in another realm. This 
is Eucken's text. Our bodies and our mortal interests 
are subject to the world of use; but our spirituality, our 
immortal part, is above use. The artist-life of the soul 
— and the soul's life is characteristically artistic — lies 
in the self-revelation of its own nature, and this is a 
growth which takes place in a world of beauty, passion, 
adoration — in a word, of ideality, where what Words- 
worth calls "our meddling intellect, ,, the practical rea- 
son, has small part. 

I well know how opposed this doctrine is to the ruling 
spirit of our time, which shrinks our lives to the limits 
of an economical and mechanical sphere, to use Eucken's 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 291 

phrases, and accustoms us to the dominance of their pre- 
cepts and methods. Art with difficulty finds room among 
us. It is not by accident that our most literary tempera- 
ment, Henry James, and our two great artists, Whistler 
and Sargent, have had their homes abroad, and that from 
the beginning the literature and art of America have often 
had their true locality on a foreign soil. Yet, whatever 
may be the seeming, it is always true that the soul grows, 
it is not made; and the world of art is chiefly precious to 
us because it is a place for the soul's growth. 

A third main trait of the world of art is that it is a place 
of freedom. I have already alluded to this briefly. It is 
not merely that the soul is there freed from the manacles 
of utility and has escaped from the great burden of suc- 
cess in life; that is only the negative side. It has also, 
on the positive side, entered into a realm of new power, 
the exercise of which is its highest function. The soul 
transcends nature, and reconstitutes the world in the 
image of its own finer vision and deeper wisdom, realizing 
ideality in its own consciousness and conveying at least 
the shadow of its dream to mankind. It transcends na- 
ture in creating form. The Hermes of Praxiteles, 
whether or not one knows it is Hermes and discerns in 
it the godlike nature, gives to all ages a figure such as 
nature never shaped. The soul, also, in its artist-life, 
transcends nature in idea; each of us, in reading the 
play, may believe he is Hamlet, but each is well aware 
that he is identifying himself with a more perfect type 
of himself, such as is known only to the mind's eye. 
And, similarly, the soul transcends nature in the field 
of the relations of things; it builds up an Arcadia, an 
earthly Paradise, an ideal state, a forest of Arden, an 
island-kingdom of Prospero, a Round Table, a School 



292 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

of Athens, a Last Judgment, a legend of the Venusberg 
— what not? — so vast and various is the imaginary 
world wherein the soul from the beginning has bodied 
forth that inner vision and wisdom in which it finds its 
true self-consciousness. So great is its freedom there 
that, as is often said, it transcends also the moral world, 
and so far as morals belong in the sphere of mere utility 
and social arrangement, this must be granted; but the 
subject is too large and complicated to be entered upon 
here. I allude to it only to emphasize and bring out 
fully the doctrine that the soul exercises in its artist- 
life an unchartered freedom ; for it is not concerned there 
with practical results of any kind, but only with the 
discovery of its nature, both active and passive. The 
fruit of this large freedom is the ideal world, in which 
each realizes his dream of the best. It is here that 
experiments are made, that revolutions sometimes begin; 
for the ideal, as I have said, once expressed, passes back 
into the ordinary world, and there it may be made a pat- 
tern, a thing to be actualized, and it falls under the domi- 
nance of the practical reason and has this or that fortune 
according to the wisdom or folly of mankind at the time. 
The ideal world is very mutable in different ages and 
races; and history is full of its debris. It is not an 
everlasting city set in the heavens that shall some time 
descend upon the earth in a millennium; it is a dream, 
the dream of the soul in its creative response to the 
world about it. Yet there is nothing insubstantial about 
the dream; however unrealized in the external world 
of fact, it is spiritually real, for it is lived in the soul — 
it is the conscious life of the soul. There are times, 
however, when the ideal world does enter into the actual 
world, and partly permeate it, if it does not wholly mas- 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 293 

ter it. The classic, the chivalric, the Christian world 
attest the fact, broadly; and in individual life how must 
we ourselves bear witness to the mingling in ourselves 
of the poets' blood — which is the blood of the world. 
In the intimacy of this communion is our best of life, 
and it is accomplished solely by the re-creation in us, 
in our minds and hearts, our hopes, admirations and 
loves, of what was first in the artists of every sort, ac- 
cording to our capacity to receive and reembody in our 
own spiritual substance their finer, wiser, deeper power. 
Their capacity to enter thus into the life of humanity 
is the measure of their genius, and our capacity to re- 
ceive the gift is the measure of our souls. 

Such in its main lines is the artist-life of the soul, a 
life of discovery, of growth, of freedom; but what is 
most precious in it, and most characterizes it, is a pro- 
phetic quality that abides in its experiences. The poets 
are often spoken of as prophets, and in history the 
greatest are those most lonely peaks that seem to have 
taken the light of an unrisen dawn, like Virgil, whose 
humanity in the "Aeneid" shines with a foregleam of the 
Christian temperament, or like Plato, whose philosophy 
in many a passage was a morning star that went before 
the greater light of Christian faith in the divine. But 
it is not such poets and such prophecy that I have in 
mind. I mean that in our own experiences in this artist- 
life with the poets, sculptors and musicians there abides 
the feeling that we shall have, as Tennyson says, "the 
wages of going on" — there is our clearest intimation of 
immortality. Wordsworth found such intimations in 
fragments of his boyhood and youth. I find them rather 
in fragments of manhood and maturer life. Life im- 
presses me less as a birth initially out of the divine into 



294 TWO PHASES OF CRITICISM 

mortal being than as birth into the divine at each step 
of the onward way. I am always fearful that in such 
statements, and in such a discourse as this has been, I 
may seem to be speaking of exceptional things, of life 
that is only for the select and methods that are prac- 
ticable only for the few and for men especially en- 
dowed with rare temperaments. Nothing could be fur- 
ther from my own belief. The artist-life of the soul is 
common to all, as soon as the soul begins to be and 
breathe, for it is in the world of art that the soul lives. 
The child with his picture-book and the dying Laureate 
reading the Shakespearian "Dirge" in the moonlight lead 
the same life and follow the same method. The boy 
with Homer, the sage with Plato — it is all one: each is 
finding his soul, and living in it. The herb of grace 
grows everywhere. I have never such firm conviction 
of the divine meaning that abides in our life as when 
I notice how the soul puts forth its flower in the humblest 
lives and in the most neglected places, what deeds of 
the spirit are simply done by the poor and almost as 
if they did not know it. It is true that human life 
is an animal existence, and the sphere of the useful is 
primary in it; the necessity for earning one's food, build- 
ing one's lodging, caring for one's offspring, governs our 
days and years; but if I am in favor of social better- 
ment and a more just economic order in the state to 
lessen the burden of common life and free it from an 
animal enslavement, it is not that I am thinking so much 
of what is called the welfare of the masses, in the sense 
of comfort. It is because I desire for them the leisure 
which would leave their souls room to grow. I should 
be sorry to see material comfort, which is an animal 
good, become the ideal of the state, as now seems the 



ESTHETIC CRITICISM 295 

tendency. We are all proud of America, and look on our 
farms and workshops, the abundance of work, the har- 
vest of universal gain dispersed through multitudes re- 
claimed from centuries of poverty — we see and pro- 
claim the greatness of the good; but I am ill-content 
with the spiritual harvest, with the absence of that 
which has been the glory of great nations in art and 
letters, with the indifference to that principle of human 
brotherhood in devotion to which our fathers found 
greatness and which is most luminous in art and letters; 
our enormous success in the economical and mechanical 
sphere leaves me unreconciled to our failure to enter the 
artistic sphere as a nation. 

There is always, however, as you know, "a remnant." 
It is true that the conditions of our time almost enforce 
upon our citizens, especially as they grow old and be- 
come absorbed in the work of the world, so abundant 
and compelling here — it is true that these conditions 
almost enforce a narrowly practical life. But there is 
one period of life when this pressure is less felt, and 
when nature herself seems to open the gateways for this 
artist-life that I have been speaking of: it is youth. I 
hope some random sentence, perhaps, may have made 
it easier for some one of you who are young, to believe 
in that world, to follow its beckoning lights and to 
lead its life. 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 
THE FAITH OF AN AMERICAN 



This address was delivered on November 
29, 191 1, before the Woodberry Society and 
its friends at its first meeting, in the hall of 
the Grolier Club, New York, to mark the 
one hundreth anniversary of the birth of 
Wendell Phillips. 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 

The Faith of an American 

I thank you, Mr. President; and, my friends, no words 
can express the pleasure I take in this welcome, nor my 
sense of the honor you have done me. I greet the So- 
ciety at the beginning of its career; and it is a great 
happiness to find myself asked to link with the occasion 
the memory of a man who was to me, and still is, one 
of the masters of my life. I want to tell you how it 
was that Wendell Phillips came to be, in my eyes, the 
ideal American. Do you realize what it was to be a 
boy in the days of the Civil War? Almost my first clear 
memory is of the family table when one of my elder 
brothers burst in at the door, crying out, "They have 
fired on Sumter! " So deeply was that scene imprinted 
on my eyes that I can still see how every one looked. A 
few days later a tall tree from the old family woodlot 
lay stripped of its branches in the yard, like a mast — 
our flag-pole; and from it the flag floated through the 
war. The young soldiers were camped on the common 
where I played, opposite the house; and when they went 
off to war, my father made them the farewell speech. 
I can see, as if it were yesterday, the reading of the 
evening newspaper after their first battle, for one son of 
the house, a cousin, was with them; and I can see the 
letter which two years later brought the message of his 

299 



3 oo WENDELL PHILLIPS 

death. I picked lint, as every one did, for the wounded 
after Gettysburg. My earliest literary treasure, which 
was the file of my Sunday-school paper, I sent off to the 
army for soldiers' reading; I suppose it was my dearest 
possession. I remember the early April dawn when I 
was waked by the bells ringing for Lee's surrender, and 
the darker morning of Lincoln's death. I recall that the 
boy who told me the news was seated on the arm of a 
wheel-barrow; and as I ran home, frightened and awed, 
I saw men crying in the street and heard women weep- 
ing in the houses, and while I was telling my tale, the 
bells began to toll. 

Four years passed thus. I was but a child, but I shared 
the emotion of a nation. I do not think one can overesti- 
mate the power of such an experience to permeate and, 
as it were, drench the soul; and I believe it gave moral 
depth to my nature, and lodged the principle of devo- 
tion to great causes in the very beatings of my heart. I 
was born at once, from the first flash of my intelligence, 
into the world of ideas ; my first emotions were exercised 
in a nation's pulses; high instincts put forth in my 
breast. I was but one of thousands. I do not wish to 
appear singular, or to exaggerate; this is merely what 
it was to be a boy in those days; but child though I 
was, I feel that I cannot exaggerate the passion that was 
poured along my veins in boyhood; and, as the commo- 
tion of the strife slowly subsided in the stormy measures 
of the period of reconstruction, my growing youth was 
still fed on great and impersonal issues of the large 
world. I was a school-boy, but I knew more about 
Negro Rights than Latin grammar, Santo Domingo bet- 
ter than the Peloponnesus; and the Franco-Prussian 
War, which broke out in my last school-year, was more 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 301 

to me than the entire outlines of ancient and modern 
history. Public interests had become the habit of my 
mind; and the present life was always more interesting 
to me than my studies. 

My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is 
from my college days, though of course he was always 
one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, 
for we were an anti-slavery family. A gentleman of 
uncommon distinction in look and bearing, talking in 
an uncommonly conversational manner without raising 
his voice, and with nothing very much to say — that 
was the impression, almost disconcerting to an admirer; 
one was tempted to wish he would wake up and show his 
mettle; but you listened. Then the first thing you 
noticed was that people were taking up their hats; he 
was done. There was no sense that time had passed. 
He bound me with a spell. I cannot describe his ora- 
tory. I have heard many others make addresses; I 
never heard any other man speak. I measure the in- 
tensity of the impression he made upon me by the fact 
that, while I have very little of what is called power of 
visualization in memory, there are certain sentences of 
his which, as I have been lately reading his speeches, 
bring the whole man before me. I hear his intonations, 
I see his attitude, as if his voice were still sounding in 
my ears and his form standing before my eyes. "Des- 
potism looks down into the poor man's cradle, and knows 
it can crush resistance and curb ill-will. Democracy 
sees the ballot in that baby-hand; . . ." you saw him 
stand above the cradle, you felt that, in comparison 
with that "baby-hand," the scepters of monarchs were 
as dust in the balances of power. "If these things are 
so, the boy is born who will write the 'Decline and Fall 



302 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

of the American Republic', . . ." I thought that boy 
was sitting by me in the next seat. There was such 
vividness in his eloquence. And, in the old phrase, per- 
suasion sat upon his lips. You believed what he said 
while he spoke. I remember a friend of mine in Lincoln, 
Nebraska, a gold Democrat, who was his host, relat- 
ing to me in illustration of this the effect of Phillips's 
private talk: "Why, Woodberry," he said, " it was two 
days before I got back to my right senses on the cur- 
rency question." I heard him seldom; but hearing him 
thus at intervals and at a distance, as I ripened to years 
of manhood, not suddenly nor with any intention of 
my own the spell deepened in me; and unconsciously, 
as it were, the patriotic passion that had consecrated my 
boyhood rose up and swore allegiance to this master 
example of a civic life. Then was my sense and feeling 
of his magnetic power; then was, perhaps, the tempera- 
mental sympathy that has since made me, as you know, 
a past-master in heresies; but, more than this, there was 
the craving of the human heart for a living personality 
from which to draw strength in its faith, and of all the 
leaders of that time he alone was to me a living person; 
only from him did I have that touch which is, from gen- 
eration to generation, the laying on of the hands of life. 
I came to feel him yet more near. I met him once or 
twice. The first time was in my brother's store. He 
spent two summers at Beverly, during which I was for 
the most part away. He used to come up for his mail, 
and would step into the store to read his letters and talk 
for an hour or so every morning; and so he became for 
us, in a way, a household memory; and he left two 
mementoes of himself, illustrating two sides of his na- 
ture — one, a portrait of John Brown, the other a 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 303 

Greek terracotta mask of a woman's face, from Charles 
Sumner's collection, as beautiful an example as I ever 
saw. Sometimes a child — he spoke to all the children 
on the street — would come in for his autograph; and 
he wrote, as was his well-known custom, the words, 
"Peace, if possible; but justice at any rate." These 
are memories of his age. There was another Phillips, 
of whom I will speak later. This was the Phillips that 
I knew — an old gray man, simple, kindly, serene; a 
gentleman in every line of his fine features, in every mo- 
tion, in every fiber; a type never to be forgotten by 
eyes that saw him. At a little distance he might have 
been taken for some old farmer, especially with his great 
overcoat. It was thus he looked at Arnold's lecture 
when he spoke some after-words of truth about Emer- 
son. In the streets of Boston, toward the end, he 
seemed a somewhat lonely figure, I used to think. I 
remember Nora Perry, the poetess, who knew him well, 
telling me of his meeting her once there and asking 
where she was going. "To see a friend," she replied. 
"Ah, he said, you remind me of the Frenchman who 
received the same answer, and said, 'Take me along. 
I never saw one.' " Phillips had friends, and I have 
known some of them who have enriched my impression 
of him as a personality; but in early life he had few, and 
a man, though he have many friends, may sometimes feel 
like that. 

Of course I do not mean to pronounce any eulogy 
of Wendell Phillips, or to review that career — one of 
the most dramatic in the annals of American biogra- 
phy — though it tempts my pen. Others, whose lips 
are more skilled than mine in public encomium, will do 
that to-night before great audiences; the present leaders 



304 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

of those causes which he championed in their birth 
will bring him praise; the race to whom he devoted 
his prime, chief mourner at his grave, will deck the sod 
with flowers and cover his memory with gratitude. We 
are but a little band of friends gathered together to con- 
sider the lesson of his life. I desire, as the leader of 
our thoughts, to regard him independently of the transi- 
tory events and measures of his career, and rather to 
set forth what was fundamental in that spirit, of which 
his acts and words were merely the mortal phenomena. 
That spirit, most strictly stated, was the soul of New 
England. He was a New Englander, a Bostonian, and 
yet more narrowly, a Boston Puritan. I refer not so 
much to his birth, as to his substance. The pivotal 
points of human history seem often ridiculously small. 
You remember Lowell's fine sentence: "On a map of 
the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, 
Athens with a finger-tip; but they still lord it in the 
thought and action of every civilized man." The Puri- 
tan spirit is a similar phenomenon; it presents the same 
union of intense localization with a world-wide speech 
of principle. Wendell Phillips was that burning nucleus 
made a living soul, whose vibrations were sent through 
a people. Moral depth was the distinguishing trait of 
his nature, as remorseless logic was the biting edge of 
his mind. He sent his roots so far down that they 
seemed to clasp the very rock of righteousness, and 
thereby he towered the more high and strong in the 
intellectual air of truth. You may know a Boston man 
by two traits, not that he has any exclusive ownership 
of them: he thinks he knows, and he thinks he is right. 
In a world prone to error men smile at such claims; 
but what if by chance they should be well founded? 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 305 

Wendell Phillips did know. Wendell Phillips was right. 
How did he achieve such an uncommon distinction in 
a public man? 

Phillips believed in ideas. They were his stock in 
trade, his armory, his jewels — what you will. To know 
them, to present them, to discuss them, to make them 
prevail — that was his life-work. Other men profess to 
believe in ideas, but usually with some qualification of 
expediency, of opportunity, of compromise, and with 
frequent disposition to rely on other agencies — favor, 
money, force; but Phillips believed in ideas rulers by 
their own nature, victors in their own right, whose ad- 
vance was as resistless as the motion of matter, inviol- 
able as natural law, the reign of which ought to be. 
Children of man's intelligence and man's conscience, 
ideas are born to the inheritance of the earth. This 
belief in the power of the unaided idea to win was a cardi- 
nal point in his convictions. It was a corollary of his 
faith in the soundness of human nature: men can know 
truth; men can be persuaded of it; and men — humanity 
— will not reject truth, if once it be clear in their minds 
and hearts. The great enemy of ideas is institutions. 
Phillips drew in with his New England milk the temper 
of that stock which had dethroned a king. He breathed 
the same transcendental air as Emerson. His view of 
history was practically that of the Revolutionary fathers, 
and. in its theoretical part, that of his great contempo- 
raries. He had apprehended and thoroughly mastered 
the conception of history as the unfolding of the soul 
of humanity. Institutions are the successive cells of 
its habitancy, like the chambered nautilus: 

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my Soull" 



306 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

The growth of the soul is a continual emergence — a 
breaking of swaddling-bands, a casting away of out- 
grown and worn-out clothes, a transgression of sacred 
limits, a rending of the temples, an earthquake-fall of 
the pillars of the state, a resurrection into higher forms, 
a revolution into ampler good, an ascent where the free 
spirit's foot rests rising from the body of the dead past. 
Institutions are shells; as soon as they begin to be un- 
comfortable, as soon as the living body begins to feel 
their pressure, to be cabined and confined therein, the 
walls break; the young oak explodes the old acorn. 
Phillips was fond of repeating Goethe's simile of the 
plant in the porcelain vase: "If the pot cannot hold 
the plant," he would say, "let it crack!" Civilization 
laughs at institutions. Order, which society enjoins and 
old men love, is a low conception. It may be heaven's 
first law, but heaven is a finished place. Change is the 
password of growing states. Order means acquiescence, 
content, a halt; persisted in, it means the atrophy of 
life, a living death; it is the abdication of progress. We 
were taught that the divine discontent in our youthful 
breasts was the swelling of the buds of the soul; so there 
is a divine discontent in the state, which is the motions 
of its divinity within it brooding on times to come. Agi- 
tation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality 
resides; there ideas are born, breed, and bring forth; 
without incessant agitation of ideas, public free discus- 
sion, the state is dead. Disorder, indeed, is a disturb- 
ance of our peace, an interference with our business, a 
trouble; but that is its purpose — to trouble. Phillips, 
quoting Lord Holland, for he liked to mask his wisdom 
in a distinguished name, often said: "We are well aware 
that the privileges of the people, the rights of free dis- 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 307 

cussion, and the spirit and letter of our popular insti- 
tutions must render — and they are intended to render 
— the continuance of an extensive grievance, and of the 
dissatisfaction consequent thereupon, dangerous to the 
tranquillity of the country, and ultimately subversive of 
the authority of the state." That is the principle, which, 
applied generally, is the universal charter of ideas, under 
whose freedom they maintain that incessant crumbling 
of institutions, which is the work of growing nations. 
If, in Phillips > scheme, ideas are the agents and agitation 
the means, the end is justice. No word was so dear to 
him as justice. Every chord of his voice knew its music. 
It was a God of justice that old New England wor- 
shiped; and throne what creed you will in her later 
churches, the awful imprint of that ancient faith will 
never fade from the hearts of her old race. The sense 
of justice is the bed-rock of the Puritan soul. It was 
this that gave passionate conviction and iron edge to the 
little band of anti-slavery apostles with whom Phillips 
walked, pleaded, and preached through long years of 
hatred, contumely, and scorn. In the evening of his 
days, that molten glow seemed to dissolve in a golden 
vision of a world where every man should have an equi- 
table share in the goods of nature and the benefits of 
civilization, and he saw mankind converging thereto in 
many lands by many paths. 

I cannot fully state nor adequately review the particu- 
lar ideas of Phillips in their number; but I will touch 
on one or two of the most elementary. He believed in 
the principle of human equality. He was intellectually 
the child of that much derided but still extant document, 
the Declaration of Independence. Ideas are only truly 
alive when they are incarnated in some man. The Rights 



308 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

of Man were as the bone and muscle of Phillips, and 
the flood of human hope that once streamed from the 
Declaration, as a lighthouse among the nations, made 
music in his blood and thrilled his nerves. He was, 
doubtless, sustained in his belief in human equality by 
his Christian convictions of the divine origin and im- 
mortal nature of man, and by his unshaken faith in that 
God who had made of one blood all the nations of the 
earth, and was a just God. In Christianity the line is 
so sharply drawn between all other creatures and man, 
"a little lower than the angels," that such a conception 
of the unity of human nature is almost axiomatic. I shall 
not discuss the truth of the doctrine; but it lay at the 
roots of Phillips's faith in the people, which was his dis- 
tinguishing trait as a master of public affairs. No 
hyperbole can overstate that faith. Phillips believed in 
ideas, but not in an intellectual class who are the posses- 
sors and guardians of ideas, and by that fact trustees of 
the masses. He believed in ideas, not in the form of 
knowledge, but in the form of wisdom. Knowledge may 
belong to the brain of the scholar, but wisdom is the 
breath of the people. Knowledge is the idea, volatile 
and abstract, in the mind; but wisdom is the idea dipt 
in the dyer's vat of life. The masses have political wis- 
dom because the life of the people is the life of the state. 
An Italian boy, working out taxes on a Sicilian road, said 
to me once: "The poor pay with their bodies, Signore." 
I remembered it because the words were almost identical 
with Lowell's. "I am impatient," he said at Birmingham, 
"of being told that property is entitled to exceptional con- 
sideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. 
It bears those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, 
but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 309 

war, pestilence, and famine." That boy is probably now 
in Tripoli, "paying with his person;" that is what I mean 
by the political idea dipped in the dyer's vat of life. 
"Theories," said Phillips, "are pleasing things, and seem 
to get rid of all difficulties so very easily. One must 
begin to abstract principles and study them. But wisdom 
consists in perceiving when human nature and this per- 
verse world necessitate making exceptions to abstract 
truths. Any boy can see an abstract principle. Only 
threescore years and ten can discern precisely when and 
where it is well, necessary, and right to make an excep- 
tion to it. That faculty is wisdom, all the rest is play- 
ing with counters. And this explains how the influx 
into politics of a shoal of college-boys, slenderly fur- 
nished with Greek and Latin" — they are still more 
slenderly furnished now — "but steeped in marvelous 
and delightful ignorance of life and public affairs, is 
filling the country with free-trade din." 

The depositary of this life-wisdom, in state affairs, is 
the masses. Municipal government in America was, in 
Phillips's judgment, a failure; but I cannot think he 
would have welcomed government by commission as a 
remedy, or have ever assented to the increasing ten- 
dency toward government by experts, which is observ- 
able among us. There is government business which 
should be conducted by competent officials; but gov- 
ernment is not a business. It is amazing how govern- 
ment tends to localize itself in a class, which, tempo- 
rarily dominant in the community under special cir- 
cumstances, mistakes its interest and judgment for that 
of the whole body, and desires to be recognized as the 
trustee of the others; government by soldiers, by lawyers, 
a business-man's government, a banker's government — 



310 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

what not? All are but instances of a part trying to 
swallow the whole. It is natural to mistake one's own 
point of view for the center, hard to believe in the pos- 
sibility of the antipodes where men walk, quite naturally, 
with their heads upside down. I remember an English 
officer at Taormina, a man of cultivation, explaining 
to me with great cogency and sincerity the advantage of 
settling human disputes by war instead of by courts; 
it was the better way. It is a good point in a king, 
considered as the head of a government, that he is 
neither a lawyer, nor a business-man, nor a banker, nor 
even an independent voter. I have no quarrel with in- 
dependent voting; but when a party of independent 
voters assumes to be the brain and conscience of the 
state, and thinks to control it by possessing itself of the 
balance of power, like a clique in a Continental parlia- 
ment, and especially if it does this in the name of 
education or of any superiority residing in it, as if it 
were that remnant in whom was the safety of Israel, it 
is an insolent challenge to popular government and 
breathes the spirit of the most bigoted autocracy. No. 
Least of all does it belong to the scholar to distrust the 
people; least of all to him whose stake in the country 
is not property, nor any personal holdings nor gain, but 
rather his share of human hope for the betterment of 
man's lot among all nations and in distant ages; least of 
all to him, the dreamer, to forget where and when and 
by whom the blows of the incessant Revolution, which 
is the rise of humanity, have been struck. "All revolu- 
tions," said Phillips, "come from below." Had he not 
seen it? Had he not been thrust out of the world's 
society, and found all that was organized and respect- 
able in the state against him? the more bitter the more 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 311 

high it stood? He had with his own lips successively 
consigned to damnation the Church, the Constitution, 
and the Union because they were doing devil's work. 
"When I was absorbed into this great movement," he 
said, "I remember well that it found me a very proud 
man; proud of the religious, proud of the civil, institu- 
tions of the country. Thirty years have not brought 
back the young pride nor renewed the young trust. I 
go out with no faith whatever in institutions." And the 
lesson he had learned in his own person, history repeated 
to him from her page. Always against the mighty, the 
proud, the comfortable, the human mass had surged 
up under the pressure of its wants and instincts in the 
growth of time. Power, in the end, was theirs: against 
noble or priest, against learning or wealth, power at last 
rested with them. "Keep it," said Phillips; "you can 
never part with too little, you can never retain too 
much." Jealousy of power, "eternal vigilance," is the 
first safeguard of a free state. The people parts with 
power only to find an oppressor in its holder. Tyranny 
is the first instinct of power. It is an old maxim of 
state that power corrupts the hand that wields it. "No 
man is good enough," said Lincoln, "to rule any other 
man." Jealousy of power is of the essence of the Ameri- 
can spirit, and drawn from its historic birth; it may- 
slumber long, but it slumbers light; and to-day the 
land is full of its mutterings. 

How has it fared with the causes Phillips committed to 
the angry sea of public discussion and the stormy deci- 
sion of the popular tribunal? He fought in them all; 
he responded to every appeal, at home, abroad. After 
the victory over the arch foe, slavery, others might sigh, 
like the good Edmund Quincy, with a feeling of glad 



312 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

relief, "No more picnics, Wendell ;" but his hand in that 
grim conflict had so closed round the sword-hilt of 
speech that it could not loose its grip. He fought on, 
and his post was always ahead. There are those who 
thought him foolish, headstrong, erratic, fanatic, wrong; 
but when was he ever thought otherwise by his oppo- 
nents, or by the indifferent — men still unenlightened 
by the event. I make no apologies for him. Examine 
the record. You can follow the trail of triumphant 
popular causes by the echoes of that silver voice. W r o- 
man-suffrage, labor, temperance — these have made 
giant strides since he was laid to rest. Ireland has 
home-rule at her door; Russia has the Duma. Capital 
punishment, indeed, still survives, but there has been 
great advance in the general attitude toward, and treat- 
ment of, the criminal and delinquent classes though 
there has been occasionally a barbaric return to the 
whipping-post, and today we hear again on all sides the 
bloodhound cry for the speedy trial and quick death of 
the murderer. The initiative, the referendum, and the 
recall, there can be no doubt, would have had Phillips's 
hearty cooperation and support; they are but the pre- 
cipitation of his thought. The recall of the judges 
would not have dismayed him; he had recalled a judge. 
The recall of judges is Massachusetts doctrine as old 
as the state. It is effected by the will of the governor, 
acting on a simple address of the legislature by a majority 
vote without other ground than the people's desire. 
Edward G. Loring was thus recalled, on the initiative 
of Phillips and others, for the reason that, although 
acting in a legal and official manner as federal commis- 
sioner under the Fugitive Slave Act, a "slave-hunter," 
as they called him, was unfit to be a Massachusetts 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 313 

judge. He foretold, as did also Lowell in the Birming- 
ham speech, the present conflict with incorporated 
wealth. "The great question of the future," he said, 
"is money against legislation. My friends, you and I 
shall be in our graves long before that battle is ended; 
and unless our children have more patience and courage 
than saved this country from slavery, republican insti- 
tutions will go down before moneyed corporations. The 
corporations of America mean to govern; and unless 
some power more radical than ordinary politics is found, 
will govern inevitably. The only hope of any effectual 
grapple with the danger lies in rousing the masses whose 
interests lie permanently in the opposite direction." 
Take up the record where you will, if you deny merit 
to Phillips in his latter-day instincts and pleadings, you 
must deny wisdom to the actual movement of the last 
thirty years and the plain current of American demo- 
cratic development at the present day. 

If there has been recession anywhere, it is in the mat- 
ter which lay nearest to Phillips's heart — negro rights, 
race-equality, and in general in the attitude of the pub- 
lic mind toward the principle of an integral humanity, 
one and same in all men, which is found in the Declara- 
tion. The change of view, which I think no one can 
doubt, is not peculiar to us, but is world-wide, and is 
consequent on the spread of European dominion over 
the so-called backward peoples of Asia and Africa. The 
sins of a nation lie close to its virtues. The strength 
of our age is commerce, resting on industry. It is a 
thing of vast beneficence, and loads with blessings those 
nations whom it benefits; but like all strength it has its 
temptations. Our temptation is to exploit the back- 
ward nations, and possess ourselves of their lands. If 



314 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

they escape the destruction that overtook the Indian, it 
is because there are too many of them. The conqueror, 
in old times, when there was a surplus of subject-popu- 
lations, enslaved them. We take them into our tutelage. 
The idea of tutelage readily passes into a conception of 
our wards as permanently inferior, but economically 
useful; it breeds the notion of servile races. The ques- 
tion of human equality has broadened. It is no longer 
a question of a black skin, but of any skin except white; 
so true is it that a prejudice against one race is a preju- 
dice against all races, and will finally prove so. I am 
not going to dispose of the negro-question to-night; but 
I mean to state a few matters of what seem to me ele- 
mentary truth. 

I say nothing of the denial of negro-rights by lynch- 
ing. That is a mere brutality. We are shamed in the 
face of civilized nations as no other of the group, except 
Russia, has been shamed for centuries; but though the 
impeachment of our humanity is patient, tragic, and 
terrible, I do not believe that the brutalities of recent 
years are a drop in the bucket in comparison with what 
the negro-race suffered under slavery in old days. They 
are sporadic; they are blazed upon by the pitiless pub- 
licity of all the world; they are outlawed, and resemble 
acts of brigandage. I note only the extension of lynch- 
ing to white men and the spread of the habit of burning 
negroes to Northern States. You cannot calmly watch 
a fire in your neighbor's house; it will leap to your own 
roof. You cannot wink at crime in your neighbor's 
dooryard; it will soon be in your own. The denial of 
negro-rights by the nullification of the constitutional 
amendments is a graver matter. I have only this to 
say, that no student of history can be surprised at a 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 315 

diminishing respect for a constitution that does not main- 
tain itself as the supreme law of the land honestly 
abided by. Phillips stated the true principle: "The 
proper time to maintain one's rights is when they are 
denied; the proper persons to maintain them are those 
to whom they are denied." I devoutly hope that the 
negroes will so grow in manhood as to be their own 
saviours in the fulness of time, as our own fathers long 
ago wrenched the rights that are now our dearest posses- 
sion, from the hands of unwilling masters. 

I should have much to say of negro-education, were 
there time. The principle is plain. Demand the same 
schools for negroes as for white men. There is a tend- 
ency to restrict negro-education to industrial pursuits. 
It is the same spirit which advocates vocational schools 
for the children of the laboring classes. It is no longer 
a question of the black serf, but of the economic animal 
of any color. I believe in manual training for all chil- 
dren; I believe in vocational schools; but these latter are, 
as it were, the professional schools of the workers, and 
should bear the same relation to a moral and mental train- 
ing, preparatory to or associated with them, that pro- 
fessional schools bear to the college. The first thing 
to teach a child is that he has a soul; the first thing to 
give a boy is an outlook on a moral, intellectual, and 
esthetic world; not to endow him with that is to leave 
him without horizons, a human creature blind and deaf, 
centered in the work of his hands and in physical condi- 
tions — an economic animal. In the educational tend- 
encies to which I refer, there is too much of man as 
an economic animal; the negro is no more so than the 
white man. Give the negroes, then, the same schools 
as the whites; give the sons of the laboring classes the 



316 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

same schools as all other children of the state — citizen 
schools. Man is an economic animal, but he is not 
primarily that; and he should not be educated primarily 
with a view to that, but to his being a man. The work- 
ers should always be jealously on their guard against 
any principle of caste. The interests of the negroes 
will finally be found to be permanently identical with 
those of the working class everywhere, and labor should 
never acquiesce in any social view or arrangement which 
contemplates the laboring mass of men with hands lifted 
and shoulders bowed to receive the burden from a higher 
class more fortunately endowed to be their masters. You 
can acknowledge your inferiority to others in acquire- 
ments, capacity, efficiency; but you cannot acknowledge 
inferiority in your being. You may lay the humblest 
tasks upon yourself, as saints and sages besides Milton 
have done; but you must yourself lay them on. If our 
economic system necessarily embodies a principle of 
caste, why, then, as Phillips said, "let it crack." Let 
it go the way of many another institution that once 
seemed all powerful and of the very substance of neces- 
sity, to the heap of old shards: 

"For what avail 
The plow and sail," 

unless the man be free? I deplore the temper which 
acquiesces in the conception of permanent servile classes 
in the state, educated to be such, and the spirit of def- 
erence thereto, on whatsoever ground it may be based. 
It is not by deference that men win their rights. It is 
not by denying their own share in the spiritual nature 
of man and their participation in the high heritage of 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 317 

civilization that men mount in that realm and possess 
themselves of that good. 

There is one other point. A race is judged, with re- 
gard to its capacity, like a poet, not by its normal and 
average product, but by its best. That is the rule. I 
suppose that the most immortal oration of Wendell 
Phillips, as a formal production, is that on Toussaint 
L'Ouverture. I can remember the hour and the place 
when in my boyhood I discovered Shakespeare, Byron, 
Shelley, Carlyle, Scott, Tasso, Virgil, Homer; but there 
are some names I seem always to have known; the 
Bible, Washington, Whittier, Milton, William Tell, 
Algernon Sidney, Garibaldi, Toussaint L'Ouverture mix 
their figures with the shadows of my very dawn of life. 
I suppose I owe Toussaint L'Ouverture to Phillips. The 
speech is a marvelous example of oratorical art, and will 
be treasured through generations by negroes as the first 
eulogy of a man of their race. No one who has read 
it can ever forget its peroration, when the orator, sink- 
ing to his close, like the sun setting in the sea, seemed 
to fill the earth with light, and touched with his glory 
the mountain-peaks of history, summits of human 
achievement, Phocion, Brutus, Hampden, LaFayette, 
Washington, John Brown, and high over all poured his 
light on Toussaint L'Ouverture — high over all, not in 
arms, letters, or arts, but in moral greatness, which all 
men agree is the supreme excellence of man. There is 
one thing that latitude and longitude do not bound, nor 
geography, nor climate, nor ancestry, nor poverty, nor 
ignorance, nor previous condition of barbarism — one 
capacity, at least, common to mankind, moral power. 
Who of us has not, at some time or other, stood amazed 
and reverent before some simple human act, among the 



318 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

humble, in which the soul shone forth, as if disappareled 
of its poor belongings, in its own nature? I believe that 
the race which is thus capable of moral power can scale 
all other heights. It may be that the negroes, con- 
sidered with a view to their social utility, like all other 
masses of men, are capable only of an economic service; 
that is the main task of mankind; but beware of closing 
the gates of mercy on those young ambitions, those for- 
ward instincts, the prayers and struggles of the waking 
soul of a race. Give the negroes a true university — a 
white man's university. The trials and discouragements 
of genius are an old and sad story in our own annals. 
Think what the burden must be that rests on negro 
efforts. I say these things with no desire to trouble the 
waters, as indeed I have no right. I know that negro- 
education is in conscientious and devoted hands. But 
these were things dear to Phillips's heart; they are a part 
of the sacred heritage he entrusted to those who were 
touched by his spirit and should follow his leading. 

It is obvious that I regard negro-rights as a part of a 
larger matter, gradually fusing with the attitude of pub- 
lic thought toward all race questions. The revolution- 
ary principle of human equality flows now in a world 
channel. I am more concerned with the future of the 
backward nations, and our part therein. Something 
might be said in behalf of the integrity of their own 
ideals by one who, like myself, knows no absolute truth, 
and looks on all institutions as human — the house of 
life which generations and races build for themselves 
out of their own hearts and thoughts for a temporary 
abiding place. But the notion of the integrity of the 
soul of humanity, one and the same in all races, involves 
that of their union in one civilization, since truth is 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 319 

universal. The truth of man is as universal as the truth 
of matter, and, under present conditions of communica- 
tion, must in the end draw the nations together. The 
recent advance of the backward nations is hardly realized 
by us. They have made more speed in progress rela- 
tively than ourselves. We have progressed in knowledge 
of the nature of matter and in the mechanic arts — 
things easily communicated and to be quickly appro- 
priated. In certain matters, it is to be remembered, 
some of the backward nations have a greater past than 
ourselves, in art and in thought, for example. I myself 
regard America as a backward nation in her own group. 
We have had but one original thinker in the last genera- 
tion, William James, and I had to go to Europe to find 
it out; they do not seem to know it yet in Boston. A 
brief contact with Continental thought and affairs is 
sufficient to reveal, not only the finer quality, variety, 
and potency of civilizing power there, but the great gap 
by which we fail of their realized advance in ideas, 
measures, and anticipations; there one feels the pulses 
of the world. I cannot overstate my sense of the degree 
in which we lag behind in all that concerns the world ex- 
cept trade. I feel the more regret, therefore, when I 
observe the weakening of our hold on the one great prin- 
ciple that has distinguished us as a nation — our sense 
of political justice, in which we have stood at least 
equally with France and England in the van. America's 
title to glory among the nations is her service to human 
liberty. I can bear that we should fail, relatively, in 
art and letters, have little sense of beauty or skill in 
man's highest wisdom, philanthropic thought, or in his 
highest faculty, imagination; but I cannot bear that we 
should fail in justice. I cannot bear that we should 



320 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

tear the Declaration across, revoke our welcome to the 
poor of all the earth, tyrannize over weaker states, con- 
duct our diplomacy on a basis of trade instead of right, 
or abate by a hair's breadth our standard of human 
respect for all mankind. I lament the acquiescence of 
the times in a general recreancy to our fathers' principles. 
"The feet of the avenging hours are shod with wool," 
said the old Greeks. In the end God takes his price. 
But I pray that America may yet long maintain at home 
and abroad that Declaration which at our birth lit the 
hopes of all the world. 

I have wearied you with long talking; but my heart 
is in my words. It has become plain as I have been 
speaking that I have set forth some elements of the 
American ideal, and that at the heart of that ideal is a 
faith. Phillips embodied it. We all need a faith, how- 
ever we may strive to be rationalistic, agnostic, and to 
move only on the sure ground of ascertained truth. 
Without faith we are without horizons, a line of march, 
something ahead. All great rallying cries are in the 
future. Faith is beyond us — our better part; it is 
the complement of the American ideal, its atmosphere 
and heavenly sustenance. The faith of one age is the 
fact of the next; and then how differently it looks! The 
fact seems as if it had always been. When the victor 
is crowned, his path to the goal looks as plain and 
straight as the king's highway. Who could miss that 
road? How simple was Phillips's career! It was a case 
of the hour for the man as well as the man for the 
hour, from his first sally when the unknown youth of 
twenty-four climbed the platform of Faneuil Hall and 
at the first blow threw his already triumphing opponent 
dead and forever dishonored on the field. How prac- 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 321 

tical he was! Defeat and victory alike were weapons 
in his hands. He had been preaching disunion for a 
quarter of a century, when he stepped forth as the chief 
orator of the Union cause. He was capable of that 
great reversal. He welcomed all instruments — yes, 
welcomed "dynamite and the dagger" in their place, while 
Harvard sat spell-bound at the rapt and daring defense 
of the world-proscribed cause by the lonely truth-teller. 
Do you wonder that the people loved their great tribune 
at the last? Boston to-day has seen from dawn to mid- 
night such a commemoration as the city has not wit- 
nessed in my time — the people's tribute. Other recent 
centennials have been rather conventional affairs; but 
to-day the Boston pavements that he loved, as he said, 
from when his mother's hands held up his toddling steps, 
have waked their music, and every footfall has been a 
note in the thanksgiving psalm of the city for a son 
worthy of his birthplace. 

How simple it seems now! but we — our causes are 
doubtful ; "we are but one or two," we say. Did crowds 
go with him? "We shall be discredited." Did he 
move amid applause? "And then, the risks," we add. 
Did he run none? You need not fear that your shoulder 
to the wheel will greatly accelerate anything in this old 
world; a thousand elements of power must conjoin in 
any great forward and revolutionary change; the fate of 
the world speeds only when the horses of the god draw 
the car. It is impossible to lead life without taking 
risks. I know that much that I have said to-night is 
heavy with risk. The willingness to take risks is our 
grasp of faith. Risk is a part of God's game, alike for 
men and nations. You must look down the mouth of 
a revolver to learn how often it misses the mark. Pol- 



322 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

troonery steadies the aim of the foe. Death is not the 
worst of life. Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to 
have tried is the true failure. Above all, do not draw 
back because everything is not plain, and you may, 
perhaps, be mistaken; obscurity is always the air of the 
present hour; "at the evening time," please God, "there 
shall be light." 

No great career opens before us; for us if in our daily 
lives we make one person a little happier every day — 
and that is not hard to do if one attends to it — it is 
enough; but should the hour come to any one of us, 
and that rallying cry be heard from out the dim future, 
his place is in the ranks, though mere food for powder. 
I am speaking of the battlefields and heroes of peace, and 
of what may easily happen. For that soul which is one 
and the same in the rich and the poor, the wise and the 
ignorant, the good and the bad, a moral power, may an- 
swer to the divine prompting in one as in another. Men 
differ in place, honor, and influence, but there is one 
seamless garment of life for all. There is one lesson 
that blazes from Phillips's memory — the principle of 
sacrifice as an integral element in normal life. He gave 
all — fortune, fame, friends. I am not thinking of that 
initial step. I am thinking of his home. That plain 
New England house, that almost ascetic home, scantily 
furnished for simple needs, a rich man's home, as wealth 
was then accounted in that community, foregoing enjoy- 
ments, refinements, luxuries, natural to his birth and 
tastes, in order that the unfortunate might be less miser- 
able, is the monument by which in my mind I remember 
him: a life of daily sacrifice. This is, as it were, our 
baptismal night. I wish I might dip you in these spirit- 
ual waters. It is nothing that we are humble; the 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 323 

humblest life may be a life of sacrifice, and the poorer 
it is, generally, the greater is the sacrifice. Light is the 
same in the sun and in the candle. 

"How far that little candle throws its beams! 
So shines a good deed in a naughty world." 



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